Like orange candywrappers, writes
the daughter now, describing the time
years ago when the goldfish

She was older, sleek, and had a bite to her, but I was bolder with my knees on either side of her.

Through the night Grace lives by fire.
She sings to it, she reads it poetry,
she knits and rocks and nods and…

I’ve gone up-rivers to get rid of them
where I dispatch fish. The family
will say this is a lie

she found no reason for it setting there, the poems
not improved by poet’s name?

I think of other women,
how some are beautiful, and do not know it;
how most are not, and know;

But he couldn’t drench the black.
So, he painted what he owed it

I feel free to kiss your eyelids.
                  I remember

My father naked in the photo, young
again, crouched among rocks and water. It's an island,
a time so long ago he is thin,

I am exhumed on the express
Out of the aftermath of five,
And though I starve on consciousness