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My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

The time a man kissed my hand when we met. Though he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

You retell the story and I wait for my cues, when to smile, nod.

Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

Like every thing made, the photograph intimates a view.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.

Let’s walk down to the river, bless the paper boats and turn it all into wine.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

For the president’s arrival they shot two dogs making love on the tarmac.

A sociopathic streak on my father’s side I try to put to good use.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

The first skeleton drawn from the earth, they called beautiful.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

David Hinton

Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.

On a morning in November words appeared at the end of my pen.

David Lee

But too much rain can translate anything to unspeakable.