5.02 / February 2010

The _____ is already cool when you pull in to the parking lot. A woman in a white SUV drifts towards it, cutting across spaces, eyes drawn like magnets.

My mother built a concrete block wall to hold up half our yard. (We lived on a slope.) Father helped. When she was sixteen, my sister got pregnant. When the baby came, mother buried the umbilical cord in a cavity she had dug against the concrete wall (“near the bones of its mother”).

They built the house out of scrap lumber and blankets, using trees to help support the walls. Mom dug a cooking pit within a knot of roots; Dad made them beds out of leaves and moss.

Rain had gurgled in the gutters outside your window the night before, the earth swelling around the duplex you share with your mother while you thought hideous thoughts.   Now you plod home through soggy mud porridge because your high school is only eight blocks away.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_2/Coles.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I could say you loom And you would.   Could reach My hand to touch you- Lucid swimmer, slick Whipper snapping through My window’s dark.   Forgive me: Could almost reach.

for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA The artists of the city decided to build a glass boat.   It had a glass keel, and a glass mast with glass sails.   But what could they do with a glass boat?  Out on the ocean it made the sailors nervous.

Passivity mixed with infatuation doesn’t temper the infatuation- can we rewind for a minute, to before my confession about strapless white gowns? Whatever was happening, one of the prettiest songs from adolescent memory distracted me from the sheet, its stains, you sprawled out & not listening anyway, thinking of me as a distraction.

The sales associate must lift the lid. She may have manicured fingernails. She may be expecting a child. Inside the box, she should whisper to each of the shoes. Then, take a deep                               breath.

During the pitch black of winter, we Muktuk princesses train around the clock for our competition. We shoot rifles into the long days of polar darkness, aiming at the glowing rods of fluorescent bulbs pilfered from the warehouse in Iqaluit.

I sleep beneath the rainbow and wake from dreams of your humid core. The sky knows my infidelity. The earth, brown and worm-etched, knows my secret love. It is the Sabbath here in my perimeter. This means I pray.

The Proposition He says he wants to paint my face.   I still cannot pronounce his name.  He laughs,in a kind way, when I try.    He looks at me as if I might be a fragile  thing. Advice and a Question My sister gives it freely like a zealot gives alms.

I cleaned a rape counseling center on Sunday mornings. I began with the toilets. They were American Standards. The building was at the edge of the new highway and the possibility of a car landing on the roof was valid. This was the deep South, so just about everyone else was at church or brunch.

I should have called ahead, said I’d be home early, maybe then I wouldn’t have found you. Twin-Engine Vanishes Over Upstate New York. Feed the Bear (Market): Rumblings of Fed Move. Who Wore Who — Red Carpet Breakdown? America’s Healthiest Cities, the Good and Ugly. Broken, lost, alone, that’s how you left me.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_2/Sparks.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The homeless woman was huge, loud, foul-mouthed. She cursed at the doctor as he pushed and prodded at her, called him a goddamn-no-good-son-of-a-bitch for invading all her spaces. The doctor was toned and tan and to him, the woman was a house.

True, Hawkins buried his son more than once that summer. Wild dogs would get at the limbs glowing pale as quartz in the shallow ground, gnawing through the shroud of croaker sacks. They clacked their jaws, ceding nothing to sin or dignity.

If you listen in the mornings, you’ll hear this valley’s strips of shade stretch and yawn across your lidded eyes, the grass lock tight to your grayness.