I gave the yellow skirt away and now some other woman wears it. This mild February day my body longs for spring. But I remember the skirt was heavy,…

  with lines by Louise Bourgeois   For a lifetime I have wanted to say the same thing. Daubing red   paint against the sky, taking it away in a…

  My great-grandfather kept the peace / between the races / a man of two faces qualified, after being born a slave / to rectify and demystify the role of…

  Years passed just as years do, And I took my rescued cat, Unbruised, right to the shade Where we had planted a tree And I said to it, you…

  Tell me how the sunset gets in a bird’s wings, how they carved that road to here. Two gray feathers decorate the walk between design and secrets.   Somehow,…

  Teenage you wanted to speak English. Teenage you wanted to speak English in dreams. Teenage you wanted to speak English with no accent. Teenage you wanted to speak English…

  The neurologist says the tissue is friable—a word I don’t know. I picture hissing oil, onion-tears. My grandfather tells me it means thin, easily broken. He seems to know…

  Does a match also serve to shed light on a given subject? what if it casts doubt, the light, instead of offering answers? what if the minimal light of…

  Comfort is important whether we remember it or not they say children never appreciate their parents enough they are right. We never forget the right things we write about…

  On the bayou there’s no one to sing to but the birds it is for them you feel sometimes a song in yourself pushing against your mind from your…

  I buried the seeds of my ancestors in the next generation but a blight took the harvest and rodents stole the granary walls from what they held now a…

  Visiting rural Tennessee, I lie awake in a small motel at the edge of a small town, the night throbbing with sounds so robust it seems impossible they could…