Enslaved people’s quarters, Woodlawn Plantation, Virginia, 1820   We lay side by side in the heat, in the night’s palm, the dried sweat of day thick upon our chests,…

  When the young die, for weeks they appear in halls and crowds--the slap whisper of semblance in a body or head, a gait, any remembrance that likens death to…

  Grief is the floor. There is a door there, a door in the floor. On the other side, on the underside, in the dark, along with pipes and wires,…

  1. So many years of nightly death have made us practiced, professional.   2. Death on the other hand is scripted, sheep-worn, muzzy, and tastes bland as a tomb.…

  And maybe I’ll go back someday and stand in the shadow of the crab apple tree, look up at the window of the old apartment, stand under the leaves…

  A wife a mother a moth her   wings whaling against the kitchen window.   He loves her which is why he builds   two knotted shutters that close…

  You young men, you guns and shovels digging your perfect country in the loam,   you do not yet know what it is to cluster, to break along a…

  She did not want me to see her riding her sad whales           through the green waves. She told me this as I helped her…

  The dog’s bark slips through the wall of the house—a large dog, I can tell, and lonely.   Maybe she turns in circles on her rug. Maybe she settles…

  (Natural History Museum)                                                                 Since all I recall of eighth-grade Biology       is the fleshy balloon of Mr. Manfree’s face, and the gelatinous, white-bellied bodies  …