Elm branches radiate green heat,
blackbirds stiffly strut across fields.
Beneath bedroom wood floor, I feel earth—
bread in an oven that slowly swells,
simmering my Navajo blanket thread-crust
as white-feathered and corn-tasseled
Corn Dancers rise in a line, follow my calf,
vanish in a rumple and...

It would be neat if with the New Year
I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year.
My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots
my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws,
chews on for hours every day...

It was like climbing a mountain to those of us who’d climbed one. To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. In other words, we let everybody find her own figure of speech.

Not that it—speech—lay thick on the...

The heart, the surgeon says, does not reveal
the small rifts, the hairline cracks which

split the hairline cracks they conceal cops
and robbers in a stretch of skin flaunting

star-scars with show of blood bone
the ledges of what it holds tight in checkmate

moves:...

I hate how I can’t keep this tremor inside, this mute
matter of being made extant, this shiver in being, in
no not-being, this wild flying up from the inner surge

and this crack in the apparatus espied around
the corner from my particular...

We used to say,
That’s my heart right there.

As if to say,
Don’t mess with her right there.

As if, don’t even play,
That’s a part of me right there.

In other words, okay okay,
That’s the start of me right there.

As if, come that day,
That’s...

When I say But mother, Black or not Black,
Of course you are polyethnic, your look does not change
Though it does harden, a drying clay bust
Abandoned or deliberately incomplete,
All the features carved in
Except the eyes. What I’m trying—
I mean—You are an...

              Anger is the other person inside
                            mi garganta, my throat.

                     ...