Penelope Considers a New Do (audio only)
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Sun Salutations with Betrayal and Departure
Although this room is full of moving, sweating people—all of us lunging forward or folding ourselves in tangled shapes, obedient to Sanksrit names we’re told mean “mountain,” “plank,” “dog”— downward facing, I feel a sudden anger. After, I talk with a woman. For years I’ve called her a friend. We lean damp against the mirror. If there were a Sanskrit name for what I am to her, it would be following flower, the loyalty of a blossom that opens beside its colleague on the branch. We talk of our work. And I sense, the way spines know the limits of their curvature, that she has lied to me.
2017
Syllabus for the Dark Ahead
Throughout this course,
we’ll study the American
landscape of our yard, coiled line
of the garden hose,
muddy furrows in the grass
awaiting our analysis,
what’s called close reading
of the ground. And somewhere
something will yip in pain
perhaps, a paw caught in a wire,
or else the furred and oily
yowling of desire.
And flickering beyond the fence,
we’ll see the slatted lives
of strangers. The light
above a neighbor’s porch
will be a test of how we tolerate
the half-illumination
2017
Homeport
Even on weekends the cruiser
would shudder, flicker spaces
with a redorange blink,
then a gasket crack or a valve stick shut
as if by weather or malicious hands,
the engine room home
of all catastrophe.
I would stretch and reach
across the bed to find furrowed sheets
where my husband had slept until 3 a.m.,
when he answered the captain calling,
whose perpetual fury machine
was the only system that never broke,
2015