Poems

Years later, my grandfather

reached into his pocket for a handkerchief

and extracted my grandmother like a molar from the grave

There’s no exception to the strangeness

Who’s astonished by the way
stars smell like communion wafers?

Already the galaxy’s priests
have rounded up the runaways.

In the foliage of my life, I was honey,
something extracted, poured into another,
so when you found me

there was no resemblance
to my former self. Adept at transformation,

A boy with a long stick whacks the air.
What demon does he strike?

The tea pourer’s left hand snores on her lap.

One finger strangely points to the floor
as though downward
were the only refuge for the roughly defined.

In the beginning there was promise.
We lived together in harmony,

When the black bearskin hung from the tree
like a rug drying on the clothesline,

the hunter recounted how he started an incision,
cut upward to the head,

stopped at the mouth’s corners.

A rooster crowed at the first
strike of light, awaking the stone
child who held her own

Mother once told me my wakefulness took
up an entire floor—that’s

why I house myself in the woods. All
the tree knows of cover is moss. All

the child in Aleppo knows of cover is run.

When my husband caught the trapped hummingbird
and freed it from the screened-in porch,
his big hands, a woven bird’s nest,
a few fingers opened into an escape hatch,

I wish I could tell you more about the man
bent over the drawing of his daughters
Sofi and Sonia, how like Saint Bartholomew
in Rembrandt’s painting, the man becomes so intent
that his pencil is now another finger,