It’s time to leave again. She unplugs the fridge
and watches until the orange coils on its back
have faded down to gray. She turns off the gas.
She papers the windows in layers from the outside,
because if she doesn’t, the moon will reflect in the panes
like a lamp in every room. And then the house will still
seem lived in. And then how to move on?
The last thing she does, always, is go with them
one by one into their rooms and hold them up
to pluck the glow-in-the-dark stars from the ceiling.

They broke into houses,
my sisters. The empty ones,
just built, where nobody had yet
tried to sleep. Little mounds
of sawdust still in the corners,
no floorboards loose.

Susannah Harrison, “Songs in the
Night; By a Young Woman, Under Heavy
Afflictions,” didn’t touch him, but Morrison
Heady traveled by stage from Louisville
to touch Laura Bridgman, who
demanded that Helen Keller wash her hands. Helen
would later touch many of us but wouldn’t let us
touch her back.

In life
if I could say for sure

what I have loved
there would be

no tunnel needed

How quickly we’re skimming through time,
leaving behind us
a trail of muffin crumbs
and wet towels and hotel soaps
like white stones in the forest.
But something’s eroded them:
we can’t trace them back
to that meadow where we began so eagerly
with the berry-filled cups, and the parents
who had not yet abandoned us
to take their chances in the ground.

Weeks on my back, counting
stars not up there, cutting quick
close corners in the wheelchair

Ralph kept moving true as oil,
questions silent in my mouth
after hearing a ragged sound

Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child

After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest.

All summer the half voice lurked behind me

& I played deaf for days for to live

To not write about it to use my body

I close in on facts fine as sugar
poured from a bottle labeled salt,
comprehend nothing.