Diagnosis Summer
Exit Stage Left
Mezuzahs
My Mother’s Cold Hands
Pictures of a Woman You Never Knew
Ray’s Fine Foods
Refusal
Sail Away
Scorpion Season
Sitting Next to My Brother’s Ghost on the Dock at Our Grandparents’ House
The Cathedral of Time
There are so many levels called darkness
White Rabbit
Wood
You Should Be Famous for All You’ve Been Through
My Mother’s Cold Hands
Allisa Cherry
—layered one over the other—netted me
like a rabbit beside her undressed body
laid out in the funeral home.
Skin almost translucent,
nails bluing at the cuticle.
Long and keen those fingers
that used to unravel my knotted hair
and more than once pinioned me
by my wrist or pinched the flesh of my thigh
when I had gone too far.
Nobody told me in advance how blood pools
once the machinery of the heart stops.
Nobody warned me that purple would bloom
across her back like lilac bundles. I wasn’t prepared
for the beauty of it all.
Her lineless face. Her utter stillness. And her hands
—the only ones I trusted near me
as I labored my daughter into this life—
hadn’t they always looked just like this?
A matrix of silence. A cairn of milky stones.