From “For a Daughter/No Address”
like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us
now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back
all wet tonight and bugs call up a swamp in this desert in my story
my dad wrote all the wrong names for her on a brick that could lift
through my mother’s window came the words arrayed in glass
dusting San Martincito on her dresser cast in plastic with spaces in his robes
a home for the hen the dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel saint
still lining a thin easy silence around me come the scenes all down our street
in someone’s car music each word lifted into its own space thumps in the moon’s
heavy sleep breath there are extensions we can read what we said
it’s such a simple printshop so mothers might tell us about what came
to be more known a pear tree in the commons and really
the words left idle beside if they could tell us about the forms
if these came to lift them if we could ask sin miedo y sin piedad
Copyright © 2017 by Farid Matuk. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.