Bachelor’s buttons, black-eyed Susans,
Queen Anne’s lace and baby’s breath;
my mother loved great swathes of riotous colors,
threaded leaves, seed heads bent by hungry finches.
She never bothered with hybrid teas or
careful chrysanthemums,
boring rows of marigolds and petunias.
In tiny towns with manicured lawns and
spindly evergreens, she filled beds with mounds
of sticky, swollen peonies,
let wild roses climb the windowsills.
When it was time, my mother
gathered buckets and tubs, cardboard
boxes lined with black garbage bags.
She dug it all up:
flag iris, daylilies, coneflowers, bee balm,
Sweet William, tickseed and feverfew.
While the truck filled with beds and chairs,
foot stools, dishes, linens and books,
blankets, clothes, curtains and dolls;
she filled the station wagon
with her flowers,
covered with damp newspapers and rags.…
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It used to bother me—the way people
would cut their eyes at us as if they knew
our story. One white, one black, two men.
At first, no one regarded our coupling
as extraordinary. Youth gave us skin
to believe in and the cheapest of beer
to swill. It’s acceptable to buck rules
when you’re beautiful. But now, when our
clothes are out of fashion and our hair is thin
and grey, when one of us walks slower
than the other and the other waits patiently
at the corner, now, people notice:
one white, one black, old men. Our history,
the tilt of our bodies in conversation
reveals a kindness that was promised
but remains unrealized, a whisper
of high yellow, good hair, tan paper bag skin. …
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(In December You Return to Italy)
It took you years
to debut your face
to the social
media masses.
You started
with Christmas
lights and a risk
of death.
It’s no surprise
I’m shadows
and fragments.
You teach me
Sicilian card games
your family plays
at Christmas:
scopa, briscola.
Eventually you
moved on
to two black cats
in the sink.
Their camera
green eyes told you:
mind your own
business.
Bicontinental.
I praise the vast
distance and gift it
everything I have:
the millions of
seconds when
both feet were
off the ground
as I ran. If you
can’t already tell,
this game is
mostly luck.
– Matty Bennett…
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It was more than a blackout,
a swift dullness, as if I were gonna
faint when my legs buckled underneath
me and my ears spun out
with fussy noise that grew louder
as the view in front of my eyes,
hollowed out and bleeding like water,
like ripples of water cascading
before my hands held out. It was not
sleep. It was more than lethargy, or
oblivion. It was more than a stupor
or me swooning over love.
It was an immediate force. A kick
in my bones, as thick as lumber.
I went down like a dislodged
boulder, in the middle of
the wall. Five tons dislodging
more than sleep, more than slumber
more than temporary.
– Millicent Accardi…
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I argued all afternoon today
with my Christian friend about The Rapture.
She sat with her infant on her lap
and gushed about being taken.
Taken where? Away and up.
Her hearty baby sucked on a spoon;
she said she knew it would happen soon.
I wondered why, then, I couldn’t come.
She told me because it’s in the Bible—
that God takes only faithful Christians,
their souls unsoiled, to live with Him.
She looked at the baby and echoed his babble.
I tried to imagine them vanishing before
my eyes—would they simply dematerialize,
or be lifted up by beams of light,
and carried off through spaceship doors?
Later, I saw the shadow of a plane—
like a whale’s enormous underbelly—
swiftly graze across a hilly
field, and a thought kept forming: a refrain—
that larger things above us
can only be seen through shadows,
left for us to decipher, below—
divinity found in hushes—
the rests between the notes—answers
we keep waiting for to land.…
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tell me about the first time
you asked a lover to help into a straight-jacket—
tell me if you let them pull your hair
or if you writhed like a garbage bag of birds.
i want to know all your favorite
spots on the body
to feel pain—
i like the teeth & how they ring
like a ceiling of bells when they’re hit.
i like knuckles because they trick me
into believing there are walls possible
in me. you once slipped out
of a giant’s mouth without him knowing
but came back to do it again & again.
teach me captivity.
teach me spectacle.
i want to draw a crowd.
i want to hide keys in my throat
& hold my breath
so long underwater that
the onlooker will know
i am part octopus.…
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I stand before a pitch of hillside, evening
bled dark, a pathway of insideness
swarming from that belly
of mountain, it is a soccer team
emerging, crowd shouting
and the Spanish lesson emphasizes
the pronunciation of jugadores.
Not like doors, the mouth too round:
ladders and dogs will get there –
Something you thump your tongue against,
something that sits against your teeth and rolls
to your throat –
the shape of the tongue is a monster
of sharpness that must prick at the roof
where there are no windows. Only widows,
which my son tried to understand yesterday,
confusing divorce with death but sensing
that the consequence is to be alone
and we veered
to what comes next. Heaven— who told him that?—or
maybe you, living, remarry, or live alone in shade
under apple trees with a German Shepherd
thirty minutes from downtown.…
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