Three years after my father’s death
he goes back to work. Unemployed
for 25 years, he’s very glad to be

A year after he left I thought of the day he’d been 
sick and I’d cut my then-husband’s hair 
to cheer him up. First I combed it, 

This is the work of my life, to say with my
body itself You fuckers you cannot
tell me who to kill.

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate

You would stand under a sign saying I Like To Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like To Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.

You could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living room

A cunning oracle withholds the best.
The tax on prophecy is not to tell
the founder of a city how his sister

  and that’s how I almost died
     of foolishness
        in beautiful Florida.

I found it, slack
and powerless and belly-up.
How came it to be there?

nothing that you can hear
but the cold creek moving
over the old pebbles