Emptying Town (audio only)
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Father Outside
A black river flows down the center of each page & on either side the banks are wrapped in snow. My father is ink falling in tiny blossoms, a bottle wrapped in a paperbag. I want to believe that if I get the story right we will rise, newly formed, that I will stand over him again as he sleeps outside under the church halogen only this time I will know what to say. It is night & it's snowing & starlings fill the trees above us, so many it seems the leaves sing.
2004
Sleeping Beauty
When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle
& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-
year sleep, everyone around her falls as
well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.
Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold
in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten
all that. Even the fire returns to embers,
fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all
this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—
no one will miss her because they will sleep
as long as she sleeps & they will wake
when she wakes, no one having felt
2019
Tattoo
You do know, right,
that between the no-
longer & the still-
to-come
you are being continually
tattooed, inked
with the skulls of
everyone
you’ve ever loved—the you
& the you
& the you & the you—you don’t
sit in a chair, thumb
through a binder, pick a
design, it simply
happens each time you
bring your fingers to your face
to inhale him back into you . . .
tiny skulls, some of us are
covered. You, love, could
simply tattoo an open
door, light
2016