2019

When you ask again if I believe in ghosts,
insisting I commit, I answer with
a vision my cousin had two summers ago […]

Knocked over behind the garden bench
Her stone torso gathers ivy.

Vestal, a body premised on removal and now seated […]

In front of the peristyle a woman
gazes into a window made of water.
Not cotton boll, not ticker tape, what whitest […]

when the female would speak
in the voice of capital
it destroys the capital […]

We always think
it’s those neighbors […]

Suddenly I’m thirsty.
Sun flaring off a glossy magazine
triggers a need for liquid light. […]

In your father’s home the universe came
in one, unstitched
to me awake, to hear
[…]

If as shame is to memory, so too desire,
then is this desire, this cloak of shadows,
that I wrap close around me, that I
refuse to take off?  […]

I wake up at a lighthouse
where Ocean meets sound.

At the point of navigation
I lose sight of them. […]

I liked to think I sipped my heritage
from a mason jar,
     a tobacco drag like hardwood smoke. […]