1.
To shoulder God’s gifts. Sore feet
and a broken tooth, sandpaper and
salt. Lord, fill my hands.
The globes of air in my empty palms
may turn into your fruit. Love
in a dark room, a lightbulb’s buzz
inside my chest.
2.
Who will be my lover now?
How could I choose between pear
and sunlight, cicada shell
and icicle? The delicate ear, the cell re-dividing.
I’ve met the big picture. How could I find myself
back in my body? Only two eyes, ten fingers.
These human loves are ants crawling over my heart.
3.
So many things above me. My God is the whale-shaped cloud,
the tree’s canopy, the cigarette billboard, the rattling El.
Something to catch me, heels kicking, by the scruff of the neck.
4.
Dog on a leash, caged mynah
bird, bear on a trap. I’d chew
my own leg off, if you’d let me.
I was the gag in my own throat,
I was the spur in my own side.
A blood-orange sun rose above the buildings
to watch me step on ice my whole way home.
To walk on water. Feeling my own fingers.
I fell just once. Head shorn, I leaned into the wind.
5.
Lord, the lightning bolt, which scissored the tree
and turned my whole world white. Left gaping
in the aftermath.
6.
I thought the snow in the air
was flakes of ash, lacy and fine,
come to rest on my lip. I thought that spring’s
first sudsy blossoms were snow mounded
on bare branches, I thought the branches
out my window made a grinning evil face.
I thought my face was ice and that my tongue
had frozen in my mouth.
What I wanted was unsayable. To be gone.
To fuck my exes, bite off my own fingers.
7.
The Lord, my God, a magazine ad, a kiss
on the corner of the mouth.
Everything in my peripheral vision.
You could come roaring into this subway tunnel
like a late train, too bright to see clearly.
You could take me like sleep.
But you’re the floating trash, the city’s rotting dumpster mouth,
the sidewalk’s intimate braille of black gum spots,
the pigeon whose high neck is a dove’s.
8.
Lord, I am innocent. Stiff
as a clean rag wrung of water. To be
always on my toes, tipping forward.
Able to breathe. Air becoming
part of my bones. Someone
poured this pavement, I pass over them,
each footfall. Lord, each step
is a handshake, a moth lit somewhere
upon their face, holy ghost.
The moth’s body. My fingers. Air
in my bones. Mist in the air,
birds in the city.
9.
I never longed for an annunciation
but listened, how could I not, when a voice from the air
spoke what was already written inside me.
Like the eye of the sun tilting down through the clouds.
My name read off a list, ex-lover
encountered on a city bus. The electric
shame at being chosen. The pride,
the warmth and fury. Angel
in a beam of light that says,
Swallow this note. Take off your coat,
this is where you live, this is your story now.
A mother’s hands, paused in the dirt of her garden.
Cells multiplying inside her.
My life in bloom overnight.