Slipshape

^{A golden shovel after Suheir Hammad}

A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on
the first morning I am by myself and the
open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink
of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of

her body. To write my way out of the stories of war
I wrote the war again and again I wrote its wounds. May
arrives in a frenzy of questions. Whose children will we
lose at the border? What use is it to remember

what has never ended, to elegize how
ardently we believed? This is not who we are becomes anthem, divine
chorus, armor against the living. Our human
excesses, our florid silences, our repetitions, indelicate. Beings

so brittle any one of the next days might break us. Can
we, finally, and can we imagine what our new shapes might be?