Dawn was their greeting time.
Welcome back, he said quietly.

Concoct the stories of your own life.
The masks and costumes assumed from infancy.
Make up the true things as well as the lies.

Yes, like you, I too have been summoned
by an urgent phone call from someone
whose name I never knew

I murder my own grandmother    stuff
her corpse in my top bureau drawer
among my underwear    nightmare of

My mother shrugged off life
Three thousand miles from Paris,
City of her birth. It takes

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

Creatures of many hungers say we’re near.

The trees, the ones
she loves,
                  are desperate—