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i learned to save lives from a man who reminded me of my father

This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. His country.

We cannot leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world.

Into the storm, the iridescent cosmos. To the savage dances of sunset.

How do we heal our savage hearts, foolish wrath gone rogue on any soul.

A ripple across the darker fathom, no sooner there than torn away.

You try to confess your crime of turning the world into words.

Why am I always asleep in your poems? Look at me Ben, when am I.

Our cocoa is gone and our dreams are being eaten by mice.

There’s no need to check for a pulse, hold a hand mirror for breath.

Fumbling among the constellations, I believed my throat would burst.

I feel as if I have been struck from the book of the living.

I think there was a center about which I never even thought to ask.

My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon.

The sloshed grownups had little to say to me. I loved it that I was alien.

What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

His voice was wrung with panic as he spit curses like spoiled milk.

When I walked in, the kids applauded. They were like, “The poet’s back!”

Such longings: Errant. Verdant. To have a good time. And dream.

Unnatural as a ghost; the thought rose unbidden to his mind.

The toes you step on today may be attached to the ass you kiss tomorrow.

Our grandmothers were bakers and nurses, spies and traitors.

I wonder why I feel bound to the gray-dry skin of you, the barrenness of feet.

Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.

All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.

A family becomes fossilized—a darker crosshatch etched in hard sand.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.

He shot a spear into a boom timber and pulled the boat to it.

The canary-yellow sweater she knit while pregnant with me thawed first.