Poetry | December 01, 2010

Featuring the poems:

 

Twelve red seeds

Twelve red stains

on the sidewalk. Twelve suns

at the edge of a picture,

each colored the wrong bright shade.

 

Something will come to lick them up:

the earthworm dying on its way

to the garden, a sluggish

skunk, the soapy brush of a mother

 

who does not want her son to ask

whose or why. Briefly, she wonders

if the blood is hers.

She has a hole in her side

 

she probes when no one is looking

to feel if it still pains her. It does. It will

not heal. It will not kill her.

Her boy is beautiful and ill.

 

She can no longer see the days

when she washed his body

and thought it perfect, gossamer,

blue-threaded,

 

his small fist closing

around the root of her finger

in an unbreakable ring.

Yet she wants to teach him

 

so many things: Look at these Os

blurred to blots, these tears

of the sad, red giant!

Look at these stars, starry nights, star pins, star fish.

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