3 Poems
Nadir I
At night they went,
not muffling their footfalls,
to wake us one by one
and draw our blood.
At first I resisted, because
I resisted everything.
My voice was my sharp. They served us coloring pages (to rip) and Honey Maid graham
crackers (to crumble). Someone changed the linens,
I don’t remember who. Someone prescribed the snow, the pages,
the radio, the crumbling. I don’t remember who.
There were a lot of us.
We were a choir of little waxy paper cups.
At first I resisted because
I resisted everything. I cited every law I understood.
My voice was matted and ripped.
The nurse spoke French.
Ça va aller, she said.
We were a choir of little waxy paper cups.
We made hats out of them,
before we crumbled them,
and fairy houses,
before we unseamed them with our fingernails.
We made paper chains.
On Sundays we would crayon long lines
on construction paper and crease it,
wet it with saliva and bend it
back and forth
back and forth
back and forth
til it tore clean.
Glass Sheets
I’m breaking white crayons
beneath my garden heel,
loading Morning with my smartphone Times.
The fridge is humming like an eldritch
god. Rot is spreading:
the peppers, the garlic.
Milk comes out in clumps
with my hair, so I drink my
coffee straight.
My grandmother reproaches me from under the frame:
By my age, by my age, by my age.
Hush now, I tell her. For every gleaming
pearl around her neck, a yellow tooth of mine.
I know all about the kitchen you kept, I say.
I know how you kept it clean.
Lives get smeared under floodlights
when you take them and put them to household use.
An ending that’s not a street to avoid —
that would be nice,
wouldn’t it?
Something for gals like us
to write the recipe for.
I pick the burrs
out of my feet
one by one.
external locusts of control
at first it was just one,
a smudge on the pamphlet
at the clinic.
i grew and they multiplied,
hatched in thickening clouds
murky like a clotting smoothie.
now they swarm me daily,
crashing into my cereal bowl.
they menace my bookbag,
feast on sugar in the pantry,
lick the dewy corners of my shower.
i have considered a beekeeping suit for everyday wear.
i have considered attending family events
with a helmet like a just-crashed cosmonaut.
and to think, i say to myself, i used to be cocky.
i used to have a mouth
big enough to swallow the sun.