Ritual

Afternoon rain-
waiting for the train

to slink its headlight down the line.
My kid has a thing for switching

tracks so while we wait, I'll list these facts:
sycamore branches stripped by wind, clawing black

Against December's steely shroud. Wet
with rot and umber-green, the station steps

Are far from sound. We both of us could
Go go crashing down onto the tracks

At any time. Yet we wait like idiots in
love with something bright to come

As it is supposed to come, each day,
At this hour.

year end

Tongues of ice drip

along the wire

the neighbor walks
the dog beneath

fallen water
unnoticed on her overcoat

A car idling

delicious poison 

hinges to frost

a spectral door 

creeks open in the sky

The Way Back

The original wound is the loudest
beneath the skin. Fester, screech, fester screech.
The bound and latched wade through
swamp waters mineral as blood
drops into the muck, seals itself
as iron. Years, years later
the mud is thick and green and
riddled with forgotten star-matter.

I can feel the wound opening
now. Dark at 4:30 PM, the city
creaks and roars. A small Guatemalan
woman pushes a laundry cart down
Elizabeth Street. She has a mango
in her sweatshirt pocket. Her child
has been asleep in a dark room since
noon, alone in her constellation of dreams.
The woman wheels the cart forward,
presses the round fruit with her fingers
to feel the fibers and juice beneath the skin.
Much later, from her window, she will watch
the traffic snarl, crawl, snarl, crawl.
Taillights pooling like blood in a corroded vessel.

I'm back. Dark days coming. Marking my spot on Earth.

The Damaged Child

The hole in your head was not intended
Though I saw it coming like a Wyoming afternoon
ravishing the valley with a cumulus bruise.

Where should I have been looking?
The swings were still, not creaking.
The slide yet wet with morning pus.

You are my son.
I saw that clearly for the first time today.
Your wound unfurling as a dahlia

explodes at dawn,
as the cut you made in me expands
even now, even as you sleep

against my collarbone.
My wound that lingers
these years later

in the lightning-dry
valley of my gut.
I am in love with you.

Ornamental Pear

there is the particular palette of April's end
pear-green unfurling slow and now
wound of hyacinth patched here
and there pubic grasses coaxed
as branches, heavy umbilical blush
endure these days, then gone,
a snow of vessels burst

The Meadowland Review Winter 2011

www.themeadowlandreview.com