May I

  utter/un/utter   Names are limbs aren’t they third limbs they carry us like parents carry us they balance and ballast us they moor us and sometimes unmoor us their meaning to people who gave them to us they are climbing ivy they rise or maybe they are rooted from the grime their weight is gravity on the ground pressing into the living skin a way of passing a way of tossing the baton down the line from some other time its one way of making the living carry the dead their names at every spoken evocation listen the angel spoke to mary so we call what we name how we call how we name how we stand or handle how it is grafted into us our skin and it is scarless at birth it is and it sticks and thickens and it persists in the dark it is a chanting a spell of protection a prayer against a curse a prayer for it is when it is suddenly cut off without provocation or maybe with provocation the force it must take to make it a clean wound to make it say ...

  your drawing of a boy you were age four You Didn’t Say You Were Changing Your Name You Didn’t Say Anything   Tonight the mirror will forgive my face.                                     Sherman Alexie                                     The Lone Ranger and Tonto                                                 Fistfight in Heaven   I’ve let the honeysuckle vine rise up and glid...

  Cast Mother: in labor nearing 40 hours Father: in the wings Director/Pediatrician:   Baby: boy yet             to arrive   Setting: maternity ward   Because the truth is we invent a life for them our children where we are a part of them right a part of their lives? where we are assigned some defining role to star to manage – the script is written the stage has its backdrops   all those props come & go they are new or recently produced or requisitioned from another production lately or not so recently closed.   It’s in the Script.   We think we know it reading it off by heart, reading through the scribed   assignments cursived & curled by skill, or by drawn lots or by off-stage coughs from the pediatric director – our coach who through the complicated labor brought us to             ...

  blushing Body Worlds Exhibit Boston John 20:2   And then he breathed on them and s…     It’s shapes—it’s because words have shapes and because they make the jaw   muscles taut or in some degree not       (or/and then                         knot) that cause especially along the lower bone beneath the teeth to tighten like a high note in the voice- box to almost close depending on   the nature of what it is being called:                         the friction of it                         in that room when we were told he    ...

  Jocabed MFA Boston Aubade’s Consequence    “Enlightenment,” wrote one master, “is an accident, though certain efforts make you accident-prone.”                                                             Jane Hirshfield                                                 Inspiration   You look, though only once or twice in your entire lifetime, as a mother   and say I made         ...

  She Calls Them Allegories of Innocence   Maybe it’s the shapes of things that go blurry at first & in the blur, soft.   Even those angular sharp edges are folding so that at this distance they bear, being fuzzy, some resemblance to a child’s nighttime soul stuffed or woven & clutched in the dark, in a dark so dark no lights were allowed in. Something terrible happened in that dark, something that repels words themselves as though those words were plastic bullets & too wheedling, too weak, too shallow in the root, too new to penetrate or pierce. The other day I was walking with my son who wants to be my daughter & I was remarking how marvelous the new grass, its perseverance to move the weight of winter-compacted dirt, coax it out of the way (though who knows what is happening in that dark, maybe it’s not coaxing at all, but something more dire, more sinister in its life-drive) pulse by pulse every day & i...