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Mothersexpand_moreA goddess was offended; her altar required my virgin blood.
I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.
Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.
My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.
A memory in the drip, drip, drip of the kitchen sink that won’t stop.
I tell my sister what I didn’t tell my father, I love you. Please, don’t die.
Writing to you is like putting a note in a bottle, hoping it will reach Japan.
I should call my loves while I can to listen to the grackles croak.
He has his hands on Nii’s throat, and this time I do not stop them.
The laughter rises like the roar of a train as the men leap to their feet.
It seemed to her that they only ever touched each other in transient, sudden ways.
There lay before us a bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.
One of us broke away, cooled, and died, having never fully lived.
“I can’t believe she’s drinking,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”
A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.
After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.
Dan Gerber reads poems of boyhood, and from the end of his mother’s life.
You were drowning in the bathtub. Mother was in her room.
The angel lay in his body effervescent as a flake of alabaster.
The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.
What’s left is a thumbhouse, an inch of gristle inside skin walls.
The world seemed newly made and filled with a frightening silence.
When the population was whiter, they fawned over the Korean.
They retire for the night, he to his bedroom and she to hers. What of it?
Morie Johnson was successful. I am not a hooker. I am only a thief.
I drank every night until late and drew earth-shaking conclusions.
“No, no,” we say. “We’re fine! Really! We love things just the way they are!”
Today the game was to try to catch one of the cats in a pillowcase.
Here is where you touch the world and here are the words to feel its heat.
