Cadralor Issue 11

1.
Accidentally accidental, we left life at
our wooden house, visiting numinous
stones that seem to mark death. Gone
is good, gone is melancholy, it is dust
we eat to rub the worst symptoms in
a morning. Never we are in no hurry.

2.
Covered in freckles, writing in snakes:
I divert evening, streaming flashbacks.
You vaulted to fetch-back another sun,
my past-present myth. Which version
will caress the currents? A coral earth
reveals the air I neglected to rage you.

3.
Last winter’s roadtrip, I just hot-heeled
the lilac Rockies, an eclipse of tarantula
trees, little streams freezing. Rosy times
vulnerable, the drops on his shoulders.
Avoiding thousand silver sparks, I play
Fiona on repeat. Spells need palmtrees.

4.
We – meaningfully undecisive – turned
into this perfect-silence couple, and I
do not like silence. It shrinks me into
this amazing maze, nothing more than
colours crashing, streamlining the day
-dreaming. You just sit with the menu.

5.
A vehemence crimsons up, in me, how
I tidemarked myself, tender blue hidden
under crisp skin. Brainspots vouch that
vulnerable is the strong stage. Believe-
blaming I watered, you rocked. How
my waves capable cliffs now. In plural.

1.
Foxholing myself for a night: weekday-hotel, yes to the no
disturber, as I boot my architecture heels. Cleansing linen,
jade tiles — the windows smile back. Front desk phones to
warn: guy has asked my room number. I travel with arrows.

2.
Let’s bask in our beaming hearts, let’s catch this sunny-sand
Sunday, invitingly swashing. Your jawline sharp as sea, love
is in the perfection. I love perfect, a loud living undoubting.
Now, how come your daily kiss is so unsharing some times?

3.
Questions I never asked you, dad: why were you upset I was
smoking in the bicycle shed at school, and why did you burn
my teenage medical file? You wished my safe-soundest, with
decent diplomas. A conflict sucks me under. I walk dogs now.

4.
Thinkers in charge, vaulting over morning dreading, we fuel
in magic red-west songs. In spotting curve balls. All leads to
70s nostalgia, his back soft as sleepwalking sureness. Beauty
we scrape by eating a breakfast cantaloupe. Power perfume.

5.
Instant shimmers never instant enough, beautiful he is, long
light sun-fingers. My legs longingly longer, evening shades,
as he aims to unmatter my thunder world. Haunting comfort
in surges, shadow-doubts. I confuse how to chalant the love.

1
Five deer in a meadow
freeze as our car passes:
a sculpture of attention,
heads raised above hardened bodies.

2
Our neighbor’s maple leaves fall
all at once after the first hard frost,
her driveway filling
with drifts of golden snow.

3
A man clutching a lunchbox
looks over his shoulder
before entering the crosswalk.
He is walking backwards.

4
My friend sends me a photo
of a Joshua tree. Its daggers
fork into the sky, grey-green
clouds outstretched in prayer.

5
Your brother has lost
his memory, walks
with a shuffle and a stoop.
The house you grew up in is gone.

I

nestled in a bed of moss and ferns
noses to tails, coats of copper flame
a mother’s ears attuned to every snap
of twig as twilight blankets the forest

II

hotel sign glows blue in the distance
a beacon for mister businessman—
rumpled suit, body gone soft around
the edges, eyes buggy with sleep

III

lopsided door she shoves with a hip
outdated trailer worn from tired feet—
worn from worry and too many meals
cooked in a microwave at midnight

IV

his cigarette hangs loose from lips
cracked from cold nights and grief
trains clack-clack-clack overhead
as he pulls his cardboard around him

V

clean cot in the corner, a nightstand
two changes of clothes in a drawer—
wrapped in a coffee-colored sweater
she murmurs i am safe, i am safe, safe

1
The owl flies over my bed, stealing sleep from my pillow.
Taloned with light, the sun has claimed the eagle as its own.
A robin measures the sprinkler’s sweep, the worm’s song.
Those who escort the sunrise must part with their coats.
I ask my shadow to return the raven to midnight.

2
In a room made strange by the scent of something ruined,
the orange and pear abandon the still life. The window
shuts its eyes to a milk-skimmed glass rimed with salty kisses.
The frame stands empty, a scatter of seeds on the floor.
Night works to erase, erase, erase sidewalk chalkmarks.

3
The cedar-tainted scent of pencil shavings in the sharpener
shimmers from the door to stoke the afternoon’s evangelical heat.
The shore is a calligraphy of wrack and crusted mussels.
The flight attendant pushes her cart back up the aisle
and I notice the ragged skyline of bottles, cups, and ice bucket.

4
A squirrel moves from the worn bark of its perfect camouflage.
A wasp dips to harvest the derelict sugar of shriveling plums.
Shards of quartz trapped in granite are luminous as fish scales.
Sandwiches in repose, lank and exhausted on their pretty plate,
I have no sympathy for the ants, no memory of the cheese.

5
We wield hammers to reassemble the crushed glass of our hopes.
One corner bent, the faded photograph has no name on the back.
Those who call night by its true name are jeweled with doubt.
Evening embroiders over the argument I have with myself.
A sleeping body slips into fissures even the sun cannot see.

1
waving my bare feet from
the branch of a cherished tree
i watch the fingers
of the rising sun
set your windows on fire

2
as though left for dead
by a sea raging
itself to sleep
i wrap myself
around a seashell

3
we roll cigarettes
on a day full of rain
we are comrades
from an old war
we managed to win

4
seventy degrees and sunny
but you keep your coat on
an apple in one pocket
a straggly thread
where a button should be

5
at dusk we stagger home
luminous angels
from the summer carnival
velvet voices soaring
past the roseate sky

1.
Barn swallow describes
its large circle over the lawn,
its wingtips slice and disturb
the morning breeze.

2.
On Kilauea,
Halema’uma’u flings
its fire plume
into equatorial skies.

3.
Alpine glacial collapse—
air carries particles of soil
and grief, silica, ash,
polycarbonates.

4.
Dust, slough, plaster, bricks,
a woman dying in the rubble
of Khan Yunis exhales her life’s
warm particulars.

5.
Tornadic water spout
takes weather into its swirl,
breathes in ocean
and sand – and stars –

-1-
Light enters a triangular prism: five faces
arrange themselves to meet at six points
and nine edges, refracting red, orange,
yellow, green, blue and violet. Container
in which our chakra colors live — with
Death’s iridescent feathers shimmering.
-2-
There’s a bully on screens everywhere,
his exaggerated hair forced forward
over a forehead with ominous furrows.
There’s a bully on my first grade bus,
same weirdness threatening to chew me up,
spit me out. I track his every lecherous move.
-3-
Green trees gray the waterway of a short
mile bayou — turnaround for those sight-seeing
or fishing, a detour from Sarasota Bay.
The Sun is on the weak side, its milieu
not intense enough to brighten shallows.
Snook and sheepshead watch what’s on the move.
-4-
The blue of the farthest river is the same depth
as the one too near now to see. We can envision
what vision can’t recall. The yellow of a dying leaf
survives the yellow of a stinging bee, both needed
to bracket energetic orange and phosphorescent
green. An interstice our second brain interprets.
-5-
In the middle of May regrets grow rampant
on the trees as they anticipate summer.
and flower crazily. In thin Spring light it’s easy
to traipse amok where swampy ground
still spells Winter. Remember this transition
as a chance to mend old rifts. Riff on long shots.

1. I can’t stop thinking about the time line where
the asteroid misses. It’s just an eternity of soul!
And swimming! And fruit! By hearts I do not know.

2. My god partitions sunlight into many rays:
a favorite sunlight & not just mine. There’s fire
in the sky: of all stars, the most beautiful.

3. I watch a petal open into a skirt of pink. Always
red. Always bright. Never in need of water.
As crimson in its color as pomegranates are.

4. I am not careful. I take an arrow and revise my target:
moon tugging at the surface of the turquoise sky, teeming
with glowing arrows. I imagine it: the tall, tall oceans.

5. I’m dragging myself, the other me, every strand
up to the surface. I bring my heart up to my face.
I thought I was hard to love. I’m the same as you.

Notes/Credit: The title itself comes from “I Don’t Know” in Ghost Quartet by Dave Malloy. By stanza, the sources are the following:

• Franny Choi, “Disaster Means ‘Without a Star'” ; Ghost Quartet (Dave Malloy), “Family Meeting” ; Chen Chen, “Spell to Find Family”
• Fatimah Asghar, “Partition” ; Chen Chen, “The School of a Few or a Lot of My Favorite Things” ; Great Comet (Dave Malloy), “The Duel” ; Sappho (trans. Anne Carson), Frag. 104B
• Fatimah Asghar, “Other Body” ; Fatimah Asghar, “Gazebo” ; Ovid (trans. Rolfe Humphries), “The Fate of Adonis”
• Debora Kuan, “Moon Goddess as Sequoia” ; Stefanie Marlis, “ripple” ; Debora Kuan, “On Studying Your IKEA Rug While You’re Asleep with a Fever” ; Welcome to Night Vale (Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor), Episode 110: “Matryoshka” ; Franny Choi, “Dispatches from a Future Great-Great-Granddaughter”
• Layli Long Soldier, “Four” ; Chen Chen, “Autumn” ; Eugenia Leigh, “My Husband Tells Me about a Man Who Doesn’t Kill Himself” ; Ghost Quartet (Dave Malloy), “Hero”

‘To left and right, every moment’s delay is intolerable’ ~Aeneid XII.431

i. Behee

She keeps one hand inside the flume of herbs,
her feet make treaties with Bächle stones.
Minnows mouth her skin in tiny vows.
Slip into a stream and Bobbele claims your life,
the church kept tolling as the river played.
Love blinked, swifts from Atlas possessed a wall.
Above Höllental the char lies breathing,
a crown of pennywort remembers older gods.
The grass died, and the water still desired.

ii. Nature Runs the Margins

At midnight Herr Papst lifts his glass again,
tells the room, too loudly, who he is.
I . . . am . . . the Pope! Echoes laugh
and bartenders look down.
Yet every round contains a spritz of grace,
head-froths splash trickles on fitted stones,
carnivals beneath erupt,
a living feast before lights flicker.
The city mouse weaves the room to a full stop
and stands as if to clap, a fixture
of courtesy, out-staring every dare.

iii. The Door of Small Goodbyes

Never was too steady, the whole listening thing.
The hidden key waits within the wood,
the buried reef remembers the changing sea.
A pocket survives where blue holes have gathered
the arms of the vanished. The artist draws forth.
In fossil light appears the language of stone.
Unremembered dreams are torn scrolls,
spines still holding up their houses of air.
What we traverse has been lost many times,
and each one cleans the palate.

iv. Narri

Lost gestures, we took each other in.
The wolf once knew the kindness of our hands.
Leaves rehearsed names they were not allowed to keep,
foxes changed coats, stole shoes, storm became a song,
creatures dissolved into dawn.
Soft as down falling through grass,
the world grows quiet where creatures depart,
a gathering awaiting reply. Narro!

v. Donnerwetter

Dogs in the manger guard their scattered gains.
Rothko black isn’t black.
Mistaken for someone else by a deranged man,
the latest fragments suspect a different world.
Let Horace sleep. Went all over town, in our time,
Mary Babe and knee-high dams in Southern Hills,
cul-de-sacs for future builds, we had our names for them.
At The Spot of all spots quail filed past
the open door. The last firebird found me
some years later, sent me on with news of flame,
to make room for Frau Holle to let the weather in.

‘Blinded by our delusion, we set up that ominous monster on our sacred castle hill’ ~Aeneid II.245

i. A Hill Country Psychic

The early morning lightens dal niente;
the future waits in someone else’s cup,
another hand pours. Folios reserve in gentle light,
a coffee fortune’s house of leaves
steeping in Washington stone. Read
the gnomic metroglyphs of time,
crystallized flora breaking their forms,
Cosmic Buddha standing next door
in wild geometry refusing to take.
Lōtos eaters don’t care about the future.
Look at this lady, come from a secret elevator
at Federal Triangle, to escape the squeaking wheels.

ii. Amsels and Ouzels

An amsel, ouzel, mud-cupped in hedgerow;
they chose friendship of the town.
The tanager passes where we could not speak;
no farewell comes when drought seals the tongue.
Rainbow coverts, your olivine-winged wife
moves through the green impossible of things.
The robin’s rod and vermilion cast
in shafts and barbs living, scarlet light.
The old cemetery sings without names,
the birds and stones conversing as equals.

iii. Kölner Dom

From metro damp, climb the winter stairs;
step into the snow-swirl of day.
The cathedral’s face grimed beyond its height
fades into the white-dark.
The Roman gate stands eroding
like the Guardian of Forever.
My companion, usually so severe,
reveals a smile. Words dissolve
in the wind, we might as well go in.
‘Let’s write good angel on the devil’s horn’*
and tell heaven the work’s all done.

*~Measure for Measure II.iv.17

iv. The January Shepherd

You heard a sound and thought that hell had come;
it was my hiatus, not the final hour.
The needle marked the record of the days
as cotyledons found the light.
Each afternoon flowers slowly turned,
unfolding what patient earth
once concealed. It feels like ages
you loved the garden’s sudden joy,
the green before the bloom.
How soon gone beyond summer’s door,
before remedy can even name the cost.

v. Urvogel

The blackbird dinosaurs once filled the feasts;
alive they baked them into noble pies.
So plentiful they became a passing game,
fallen upon the common road
where every creature has to eat
for the engine inside.
No human crown claims the final word–
the beauty-witch is over the desert of worlds.
Ur greets the soul-alive beyond our sight,
in Hildegardic tongues moral creatures arise:
Good day-morning, peace among the light.

‘Gentle winds had smoothed the sea’s surface
and the frequent breathing south wind
calls them again out to sea’ ~Aeneid V.762-4

i. Black Year, Golden Year

He asked his father, but he said no;
a keymaster was summoned to the work.
The secret turned within its forbidden lock;
inheritance arrived without a word.
What fathers close, children ply,
what sons conceal, old ones may know.
A metal kingdom, devious in the hand,
and a door waiting to fly open.

ii. Swimming in the Rhine

The mud-pot blops announce a happiness;
the buried waves must be the snores
of dragons. Tufted squirrels emerge by night,
hopping from silver birch to alder into oak.
Shells roll out of the vineyard each time it rains.
The plants sustain a terrarium of creatures;
light revising the sunlight into scales,
roots under leaf-mats soft beneath
the body standing dripping on the shore.

iii. The Feel of Trees

He found a valley no road had ever crossed,
a trail the animals traced along the ridge
so long ago the worms have addresses.
A wild black rooster burst onto the path,
the fearless king of grouse nearly gone.
Cassowary cheek, jub-bub, a thunder-blue
Jurassic clay is in his call. Blood-brothers,
though we only learned it late, our made-up talk
on the hill. He sleeps on alpine moss, I can’t.
The world crawls far too loudly over me.

iv. The Blowsy Mathematicians

Stunned by the centuries, daisies bloom December,
white petals touched with magenta-cassis.
They seek new forms, imagine faces,
wonder how they might become more fair.
Every petal exceeds the calculated sum,
no blossom escapes the grammar of the stars.
They borrow colors, staining themselves bright,
inherit older equations without fear,
lean toward the posture of tomorrow.

v. Häsin

In supermarkets Easter lambs lie sweet,
powdered and holy, enduring past their spring.
We waited long; their noses fell.
Your mother and I remained as friends.
You sat upon my love-seat, would not descend
to the waters where you said one time you wished to go.
Dear Häsin, I came to bring you home that day;
we signed each other’s facing pages clean.
Your face remains, and all the love you gave;
I have kept your silence since you closed the door.

[Author’s note: Headnotes adapted from various translations of Virgil’s Aeneid.]

I. Selfie

It’s the face I make cursing the burdock
that springs up after eradicating
all the burdock. I might as well post
the self-portrait from art school which
faces the wall behind the stairs. Its
slabbed fauvism alarms me, the stare
of an inquisitor, all try and no be.
Take my receding hairline, my misshapen
toes, my search history. Here are the scars
braided into the covert flesh of my underarm.
There isn’t one pixel I recognize.

II. Moment

My lips pop apart like a koi’s
more from surprise than in obedience.
She’s sixteen & said she would teach me
how to kiss and she does, the miracle
of her tongue darting wetly into
my fourteen-year-old mouth,
me wondering if I am doing it right.
Boarding school offers constant chances
to learn — how to carve an apple like a
puzzle box, how the French make love,
the vocabulary of probation.

III. Zinnias

Dad stoops alone at my mother’s
old potting bench with the good scissors
from his roll-top secretary. He trims
a sliver from the top of each thin packet
so as not to disturb the printed instructions.
He has divided the planters I sent
into square inches & counts out seed
like they’re the toothpicks that form
the girders of his model bridges.
Extraordinary, he would say, how much
weight they can bear.

IV. Bunny

Where did the rabbit come from & why
was I on the patio mourning her broken back?
We’d had her less than an hour & I confess,
I had lofted her in the air like a weightless
Beanie Baby, once, twice, & at thrice
missed the catch. After Dad died
I rifled a banker’s box of evidence
for my red hardbound diary & there,
a six-year-old’s scrupulous penciled letters,
evasion from the start —
I droped [sic] Snowball.

V. Dream

My dead friend and her widower husband
climbed into my bed last night fully clothed
her on my right, him on my left
sketchbooks and stories tumbled among
the coverlets. We had such a grand visit
pulling the best and worst of each other
into the light the way friends do, disbelief
over the youness of you fizzing like a child’s
happiness into the lost ceiling lost
night lost people waiting to be seen
like that, and loved.

I.
A circle of glass eyeball beads strung on stretchy bands form
bracelets to ward off the evil eye. Christopher and I spot them dangling
from a kiosk outside the hippie health-food shop, on the sidewalk
by shelves scented in sage incense. I drive back and buy us each two;
we wear them to CT scans, chemo drips: wrist rings of protection.

2.
Morning coffee in a squat yellow cup, speckled like a bird’s egg.
Dining table stacked with sketch pads, pencils and erasers, a wood shaving
curled from a small plastic metal-toothed pencil sharpener’s mouth, open
tray of water-paints, the ovals of colors mixed, a clear hourglass-
shaped bud vase holding water and a fan-bristled brush.

3.
Kate was not yet three, standing in her ruffly blue Carter’s jumpsuit,
talking on her Little Tikes kitchen wall phone, laughing and rolling her eyes,
gossiping to the invisible. The peach tree in our backyard still alive
then, with enough fuzzy pink orbs to make jam. Sticky sections pulled
from the bumpy pit, mashed with sugar and boiled till thick.

4.
On my bike ride, I see an orange cat chasing a wild rabbit. Smashed aviator
glasses on asphalt. Bark Buds Mobile Pet Grooming, parked, its motor running.
Two little girls in cinch-waisted Easter dresses, their mom snapping pics,
baby on her hip. Pest control guy spraying without a mask. I want to say,
shield yourself! Construction crew on a rooftop over a skeleton of lumber.

5.
I don’t call it sleep anymore. I call it rejuvenation or falling into a comfort
behind my eyelids. Frida the chiweenie snoring on the floor next to my bed
in her dog nest – its fabric feather-like, shaped like a cupped palm.
When I wake, a ripply breeze tinkles my tree’s branches into windchimes.
Tiny dots of light dance all over my porch.

1.
Earliest memory is age three, snowy Kansas, where my Air Force
dad is stationed before our four years in Tucson. My mom hangs
my pink-cheeked baby sister’s freshly washed diapers on a clothesline
in the backyard, and they freeze like popsicle prayer flags
and when they thaw, the cloth is so soft.

2.
In Fry’s floral department, I tsk, tsk. Pink carnations are crisp-edged,
sunflowers’ faces bend over their vases, looking down at the floor.
When I was sick, my beloved sent me a dozen red roses and now
that he is out of the hospital I am determined, so finally find a succulent
with a lone star blooming atop a stem circled in spiked leaves.

3.
Bright cold altar of my fridge holds bread, cheese, milk, Pellegrino
sparking water, and a bowl of ripe apricots. Sweet orbs small enough
to fit into a cupped palm. Soft skin like a toddler’s. Coral-colored
summer fruit that pops right off the center seed to wash, pull apart,
and place in your mouth like candy. Yum.

4.
Once I saw flamingos at the local wildlife zoo and they really did stand
on one leg. There is a house around the corner the owners decided to paint
buttercup yellow and surround with a white picket fence. Last December,
they placed pink metal flamingos in their front yard
and dressed them as Santa and two reindeer.

5.
At Build-a-Bear, we stand in line with customers at the stuffing machine
who answer the employee’s question: stuffed lightly or full?
My granddaughter says she will take care of hers as if it were her child
and when it’s her turn, she picks a pink plastic heart, rubs it on the bear’s fur,
then makes a wish before it’s placed inside and sewn shut.

I. Ghostly Cinema
Theatre popcorn machines grow silent
proscenium archways smell of Lysol air fresheners
rather than the aroma of butter, salt, nachos, and hotdogs
dripping mouthwatering juices from roller grills—
intense flavors fill empty lobby air pockets, coat
classic velvet rope stanchions separating phantom crowds
at empty AMC concession stands while future attraction
posters sit tight and await deliverance from a plethora
of banners covering them like saffron sashes stamped
with crass bold lettering announcing their cancellation.

II. Kaleidoscope Churches
Rainbow archways stretch out like the arms
of a savior beckoning, welcoming everyone
within as a bingo caller’s voice ricochets off
church pews, sacrosanct walls, and rafters,
echoes in the distance, settles between treads
in parking lot tires. Brethren share secrets
touching palms, making signs, uttering oaths
as rare as dewdrops on midday asphalt,
as reliable as grace dropping like butterfly dust
from a tiger swallowtail’s billowing wings.

III. Sylvester’s Solace
Declawed, diminished, deceased, deeply buried
Sylvester sharpened phantom nails on shag carpets
come every midnight witching hour as ghostly
black ‘n’ white British shorthairs are wont to do;
Carole and I seldom peeked behind us for consolation
yet we longed to hear furry hallway footsteps, kitchen
pepper sneezes, and feline purrs slowly rise-up furnace
grates—the recently departed communicating, consoling,
comforting us—the living—while curled its backyard grave
inside a catnip-cradle coffin napping ad infinitum.

IV. Missed Achievements
I paid most debts for most items that I’d broken
except for my dreams and your body’s chill
both of incalculable value as priceless
as orphaned children mingling around warm hearths
where they heat frozen fingers poking out
of wrist-warmers and thaw icy chapped hands
beneath woven mitts…. Like the neophytes, I should
have pressed my love’s dying digits to my lips
and accompanied her singular spirit on death’s
lonely journey—an act of incalculable worth.

V. Tunnels
Like Gilgamesh trekking through Mount Mashu
I wander through dark storm drains searching for life
that does not expire as swiftly as hourglass sands drop
where moons never rise, suns never set, and gem
bearing trees remain unplucked, a quest that pushes
adventurers though moist bellies of stone and emerges
beyond beauty’s brevity, greed’s pitfalls wealth’s dead-end…,
renewal outlasting sleep’s short death, always moving
I shed each journey’s outcomes like snake skin scales
sidewinding my way to each new horizon’s seductive lure.

1

        a friend says he shaves extra close editing his sleeping and waking selves

he examines his face for wrinkles and hints of ambiguity

                he traces his conscience in silverpoint on a fogged bathroom mirror

his outline in blood on glass disappears as shower steam dissipates

2

          Mojave sand dotted mint-green tumbleweed sapphire mountains ring it

 thunderclouds scud Van Gogh’s wheat field in waving copper sheaves that tarnish

                crimson sunset breaks through across a magenta and amethyst sky

the windshield rattles chill frail memories that fingertips barely touch

3

        I tighten a lilac comforter and fabric strains across shoulders

aluminum foil wrap made Hostess Ding Dongs gleaming silver presents

                I dream of lilac trees in full bloom get lost in purple clouds and scent

Ding Dongs now come wrapped in plastic that glints in light loose as translucent shrouds

4

        raven’s present by absence from a bleached wooden power pole’s cross-tree

the window’s just dirty enough to show Dad not coming to clean it

                hawks variegated grey smudges spiral overhead against azure

scattered dust motes float past a sunray flash white duck back into shadow

5

        a piano trill goes on forever like my great-grandfather’s alarm clock

black husks last year’s unripe figs fall from top branch tips speckle dark wet ground

                a wind-up clock face round and black whose radium numbers glow at night

two bougainvillea stumps next door are sending out green leaves and shoots

¹ Title taken from the poem “A Wave” by John Ashbery, in the collection of the same title.

1

            a tree’s song its sad blue leaf hums through unpainted newel post’s woodgrain

floor planks and joists hum harmony nails holding planks down vibrate loose

                        plaster wall cracks leaf-vein patterns lath underneath breathing swells contracts

2

            Van Gogh’s wheat fields blur their soil an ocean their sky breaking deep blue waves

the wave when I was four wrapped its gray sandpaper blanket swaddled me to drown

                        sun breaks gold runs floating in ripples green shoots in darkening blue black

3

            bright-green moss grows through cracked blackened steel in a Volvo’s passenger door

Herkules a mechanic’s well-worn forged-steel multiple-socket wrench

                        the phrase LA MAIN DE DIEU shining welds atop orange-rusted steel

4

            a crow screams over and over atop a grey wooden power pole

white bones black blood the crow screaming we’re next screaming for what seemed hours

                        atop a grey wooden power pole where a red-tailed hawk had eaten

5

            wave caps white over two small boys sitting braced on a stone breakwater

one in a striped shirt one in a dark shirt looking away from the wave

                        the wave white froth against stone comes not to take them away but to play

² Title taken from the poem “Mustangs at Midnight” by Becky Boling, which appeared in GLEAM, Issue 8.

1. A crow flaps in circles between here and a tall pine tree, laughing continually. It sometimes does this several times in a row without stop, flying lap after lap. I have never known a bird to fly and laugh at the same time. I have a hard time laughing. The crow perches atop the pine, still laughing. The weight of human experience in the color of that plumage is the water pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Maybe it laughs so it is able to fly at all. It has done this almost every day for several months.
2. My great-grandfather crafted all the woodwork in his kitchen, including a row of small white doors along the top of a long wall cabinet. Their size contrasted with the open spaciousness of the baseboard below them, the life raft-sized kitchen table where the family congregated whenever we visited, the room’s overall largeness. These doors had tiny latches whose handles looked like crosses. My great-grandmother almost never opened them. She almost never mentioned the boy they lost when he was young. Mainly just his name, Billy, and how she missed him. She didn’t talk about his life or how he died.
3. I drink black coffee like water. Dad smoked cigarettes as if air. Went through Pall Mall Reds by the carton. The gas station around the corner had the cheapest price in town and became his daily stop on the way to work before dawn. The same way I brew my first cup while the sky is dark, the fulness of color and memory dripping through the small hours into a glass pot. The rope end of grey-blue blue rising, the rest of the rope curling against gravity from a lit cigarette. An alchemy holding calm suspended for a few minutes.
4. There was only half a moon but a raccoon stopped at the gatepost of my neighbor’s driveway. It looked up at us, turned, walked slowly downhill toward the street. A second raccoon soon followed. Teri spotted what she said was a yellow dog, actually a coyote, doing the same. Teri and I had been watching Venus brighten in the western sky. Mercury followed, a faint red dot far below and a little farther to the north. Then the animals appeared. I wondered why no skunks had preceded them, their scent a pungent incense to purify the path for the others.
5. I pulled out my handkerchief and pings and clangs echoed off the polished cement floor and brushed aluminum furniture, loud as church bells inside the sun-bright, window-walled restaurant. Shiny penny on the table. Nickel underneath reminded me of Teri’s lucky nickels. Another penny. Rachel said she’d leave them after she died. A half-hour later my boss’s husband found a penny next to his foot as we were leaving. None had been there all this time. That evening, I watched fireworks bloom just one color, red, over and over. Tomorrow was Independence Day. So was today, Rachel had been reminding me.

³ Title adapted from a line in the poem “The Ice Storm” by John Ashbery, in the collection April Galleons.