stairs that weren’t there. I told my son that,

in his late forties, when he said I never

told him anything about my family—

and he said, What did they do then, throw him down the cellar

stairs?

This morning, in a dream, his father came into a restaurant, I was

waiting on the banquette

and I saw him at a distance, taller than everyone,

and with that light in the air around his face

I had seen, sometimes, when I’d arrived late to meet him.

It was not his whiteness—I had seen it around my boyfriend’s face

in high school.

With Joey I thought it was genius, inspiration almost like possession,

and I think it was,

with my ex I thought it was goodness but I think it was sexual liking

and the illusion his tolerance for me would be lifelong.

I don’t remember the last time we made love before I moved into the

living room when I understood he was really going to leave me.

I didn’t know it was the last time,

but it was like all the other times, complete, and wrenching,

though I think I said, after the series of orgasms, One more? and

did he kiss me,

or smile, or grunt,

and I came again, although I was dead.

May 14, 2020

I lay a curse on every person of no

color who had kneeled on the throat of a person

of color. Figural or literal—

this is no

Mother May I,

I have no mother, I am the mother,

I am a white mother, laying

her curse. We’re on the way out—if our species

lasts long enough, there will be no one of no

color. Meanwhile I curse us, for our murderous

ignorance. I have not cursed

anyone before, not my mother when she was

knapping the little knobs and tabs of my

soul off me, nor my father when he was

harming my sister. But I curse them now,

as white criminals, and I curse myself

with them. May we eat the knowledge

of suffering, may we eat the bitter

waste of the false food we have fed

others. May we eat it in pain, and in time.

My Hand

When I look at my hand, and at the back of my wrist,

gleaming with the petrolatum which I’ve

rubbed into its chap—mineral oil,

ceresin, lanolin, panthenol, glycerin,

bisabolol, I see the fine

wrinkles, many making diamond shapes,

some of them long cicatrice wobbles—

it looks touching to me, and lucky. And I like

the veins which bulge up from the back of my hand.

I’m a member of a couple. My partner is in

a linen shift, a pine box,

a New Hampshire earth—sacred in the Jewish

cemetery. I say to you, Carl,

my darling, it’s O.K. your tissue

will melt with the dirt when spring comes,

it’s O.K. you cannot change the shock-

shape of your body I love, you are innocent

of death, you are good.

We are a couple. Remember when I climbed into your narrow