When my upstairs neighbor invites me to her baby shower, 

                I feel guilty about forgetting to bring in my recycling bins, 

again. I am a bad neighbor, but she’s going to be a mother 

                so she’ll have to practice forgiveness on someone first. Usually, 

I’m a people pleaser. I am a people. I was born 

                with all the people I could ever create, inside me. I try 

to forgive them—their dirty handprints on my skirt, the towels

                left on the bathroom floor. We blessed the baby 

while we tied around our wrists one long, red string. 

                For a moment, the string connected us—wives, mothers, 

and me, neither—until it didn’t, until the scissors severed 

                us, made a bracelet of the blood string. I told the baby, 

I give you this wrist. The world will break all your blessings

                if it wants, and believe me, baby, most of the time, it wants.

    Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way, 
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, 
          First pledge of blithesome May, 
Which children pluck, and full of pride, uphold,
   High-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they
      Eldorado in the grass have found, 
        Which not the rich earth’s ample round 
    May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me
   Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be. 

    Gold such as thine ne’er drew the Spanish prow
Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, 
          Nor wrinkled the lean brow 
Of age, to rob the lover’s heart of ease; 
   ’Tis the Spring’s largess, which she scatters now 
To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, 
       Though most heart never understand 
    To take it at God’s value, but pass by 
    The offered wealth with unrewarded eye. 

    Thou art my tropics and mine Italy; 
To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime; 
          The eyes thou givest me 
Are in the heart, and heed not space or time:
    Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee
Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment 
       In the white lily’s breezy tent,
    His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first 
    From the dark green thy yellow circles burst. 

    Then think I of deep shadows on the grass, 
Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze, 
          Where, as the breezes pass, 
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways, 
   Of leaves that slumber in a cloud mass, 
Or whiten in the wind, of waters blue 
      That from the distance sparkle through 
    Some woodland gap, and of a sky above, 
    Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.

    My childhood’s earliest thoughts are linked with thee;
The sight of thee calls back the robin’s song,
          Who, from the dark old tree 
Beside the door, sang clearly all day long, 
     And I, secure in childish piety, 
Listened as if I heard an angel sing
        With news from heaven, which he could bring 
    Fresh every day to my untainted ears 
    When birds and flowers and I were happy peers. 

    How like a prodigal doth nature seem, 
When thou, for all thy gold, so common art! 
          Thou teachest me to deem
More sacredly of every human heart, 
    Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam 
Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show, 
       Did we but pay the love we owe, 
    And with a child’s undoubting wisdom look 
    On all these living pages of God’s book. 

Cartoons. Computer-generated smiles
and fixed eyes fill my daughter’s screen, show her
form is content, content form.
She’s over unicorns. Now she plays a child
who always knows best. There’s nothing to fear
except when we near

an evening when the moon’s not giving light,
turning away. It’s late for attitude,
but it’s now that rude
words are a parent’s heritance. Is she white?
Race is something her father has, a way
of arresting play

away from her, in Timothy’s long trail
of ancestors, immigrants, grasping arms
out of elsewhere, of whom she’ll be one. The child is real.
In the bedtime story she tells herself she’s charmed,
just like her own father.

Where is my head? I’m not sure. Why are some people born straight, and some crooked like me? My queer spiritual healer said this, and I can’t stop thinking about it. A winding wood, growing crooked, nothing straight about me. If I had the chance to choose, I wonder what it’s like to be normal. But then, of course, this is the turn of the poem. A crooked growth means it can be a loophole. And a loophole can be a means to freedom. I like being free. I like kisses on the nose. I like the smell of my feet and your armpits. I like the smell of gross. I like tasting blended tangerines. I like the gap in your teeth because my tongue fits like a key. I like the holes in my heart because it makes me see. Had it not been, I would have never noticed.

Under the marked-down dresses, we conjured trips to Oslo.
Also to Lima. Mel says the game was my idea, hiding
behind hundreds of hems, inventing trips to cities we knew
 

only as pleasing arrangements of letters, places we’d likely
never see. Mel says it’s how she remembers me: cross-legged, knotting
lengths of licorice, traveling the planet under racks of final sales.
 

A rhinestone belt fell on my head once, she says, and I kept on talking
about Alaska, the claws of King Crabs we’d crack open and taste
the arctic, find out what we were missing at Red Lobster. Our travels
 

to nowhere, she says, lasted beyond the training bras
we compared in the dressing room. So what explains it, my failure
to recall these conjured trips, or why my psyche delivers words
 

from a woman I never sat with under packed rows
of dresses—the poet Fanny Howe asking what keeps the temple
of imagination burning with candles against all odds, whether it remains
 

behind a nipple and a bone? This fraught asymmetry with Mel occurs
after our nipples became a milk source. We’re older, bowling by chance
in adjacent lanes, recognizing each other most from the bodies
 

of our children—echoes of ourselves in their noses, a familiar drop
in their shoulders. How’s it possible, Mel asks, you recall none of it,
not even the red stickers that stuck to our palms? You must
 

remember picking off those stickers, she insists—amid news
of her divorce, her interest in crystals. I deliver trivia
about my long-haired sons bowling into the gutter, about my brother
 

who bowls much better, and still lives in town. New pins lower
like sets of dentures, get swept again into the open jaws
of our separate lanes. There’s no saying it: my betrayal. How else
 

to name the absence of our game in my mind? The thick clouds
over Lima, I remember; I got there after college, saw
the bronze rear of Pizarro’s horse before protesters heaved
 

his pedestal to the ground. Alaska, too, I got to see, confused
the sound of calving glaciers with the blasts of rifles
I knew here, where Mel’s continued through forty years
 

of deer season, the few weeks each November
for shooting bears. If I’d stayed, had Oslo remained
a sonic cluster, would my lack of recall rub less? Guilt
 

is what floods me at my swift retrieval of Fanny Howe’s lines
but not the hems in Value City. I tell Mel the rhinestone belt
must’ve done something to my brain. We hug, exchange numbers
 

we’ll never use. If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone
for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body
of a poem, in meanings left between the spread knees
 

of enjambment. The next bowlers go live on the lane screens:
Eddie Wins, JP the Dream Pony, La Reina Carla, and CU
on the Moon. Reader, some of these names are flourishes
 

for the sake of this poem. Eddie Wins, he’s up there. Also Carla,
but with no bravado. CU on the Moon is true; someone assuming
our lane has lunar plans and wants a companion. Maybe Carla.
 

Maybe JP, who prefers to keep his dream pony to himself.

is the one in which she devours an egg sandwich on the overcast train ride to Montauk. Both of us desperate to quit the city, even just for one day, so foolishly we underdressed for the sea. How far a few bucks take us: to the top of a lighthouse, a tote bag full of ceramic souvenirs, a single lobster roll. She poses for photos along the bluffs. I dip my feet into the cold ocean. We talk about our parents, their failures, our own. As she naps on the sand, wrapped in a gauzy scarf, I shiver and watch the clouds move fast across the horizon to reveal sunset’s approach. It is just a sunset. It’s beautiful, and means nothing more than the end of a long day. At dinner, we bicker about the bacon in our pasta. The argument is more about exhaustion than it is about pork. We spend what feels like hours in silence drinking water from a patient bartender. We don’t speak again till we board the last train back to the city when she offers me gummy candy from the depths of her bag. She is alive, and our bodies recline on the train’s seats and thrash with laughter from a joke only we know.