Poetry

To protect the instrument, she spent all night
gesturing at plates or nodding yes to the glass of white. 

That God first placed an angel
with a flaming sword to guard
Eden’s closed gates, that He gave us
signs to declare a different logic,

We are tired of arguing about who is the most hurt.
Better to toddle off for a little Chinese.
The locust flowers each year like cornmeal in the gutters.

Spark, then fire begins. Fire pulls oxygen
deep into the box. Come, child, there’s something
I’d like to show you in the back of this

I am not yet dead. Do not call this miracle or raise your hands in praise. First, 
you should know how long I prayed, and how I came to know the silence of the Lord.

They put their guns in the only boxes
that they had, and those the well-
liquored strips of gin barrels 

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

No one picked in the fields on Election Day. 
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff. 
The children sang songs like it was Sunday. 

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade