I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

In this one, nothing will happen, like in life, unlike in life, where everything happens.

So a few weeks before that Christmas, I decided to do some detective work. I was interested in science and generally curious ...

We walk to the edge of the continent / and there in the sand I turn to her and say, / look,
this is where I buried myself 

[Menopause is seated in the easy chair stage right. She is wearing a pink, bedazzled track suit. She has before her the full-length mirror. On the floor next to her, a set of hand weights, which are also pink.]

So on this X-mas eve. There I was. Sitting in the basement. On an old blue sectional couch. Alone

 Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.

They sat on the grassy bank, clothes clinging to their wet bodies, watching the river flow. A few raindrops splashed on the surface, tiny dimples rushed away downstream. Neither of them bothered to point out that it was going to rain.

- My best friend and I drink cheap vodka in water bottles on Christmas Eve, watching Jesus movies with my parents.

I stopped drawing stars on my student’s papers. Stars are dying suns shouting out “goodbye!” as they disappear. Why should that signify... more

Confessions don’t make good stories. 

It’s winter and again
my knees are beginning

to ache. My wants

 It doesn't take much for a curve to become a coil, for a bridge to become a cage.

I’m going out
to snag a man. 

I was at a party for the end of the world. I came so I wouldn’t be alone. I guess so did all the other women. They must... more

my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.

We were listening to the bombing over the radio while my mother drove me to confirmation class that night.  The radio said We... more

I could take my hands off. Just unlock them at the wrists, snap them off like the heads of artificial flowers. As long as... more

That winter my mother takes me to her country, a little place on the equator I had not yet seen.

the night of the attack

mother did you hear them
they had tongues like lightning
and forked through the forest
shooting the... more

The man keeps thinking about the power lines—the ones that are strung over his house.

Sometimes at night, he can hear them up there,... more

I don't like most people. And have been jealous of Bud for ages. With reason.

Is there ever a time to think of poetry? Of poets? Of the rivers of the delta? 

Subtraction, division,

rabbit bones, rabbit lives

They never seemed to notice me, not even when I rolled up my uniform skirt, like the other girls did, and walked the stairs in front of them.

Nothing has ever happened that didn't make perfect sense. 

Nothing yet anyway.