set of different sieve fronts

through which the worms of meat would ripple.

She was so tall, 5'1", and the hole in the

metal mountains from which the meat-loaf-to-

be would come was way over

my head when I’d stand in hope to be allowed

to cup my palms and receive the curly

rose-colored tresses. In summer, my mother

would send me to the school yard with a patty

of ground round, but by the time I got to the

head of the grill-line, I had eaten all

my rubies. By then I guess I knew about

animals with breasts,

who donated their lives to us, but I

don’t think I remembered by then

the look of my mother’s nipple when it popped

out of my brother’s mouth, like a berry

with bracts, like the red jujubes of life,

the food of envy, never again

would I be allowed to nurse at God directly.

Her Portrait

The off-white curve, at the base

of each of my mother’s strong stiff nails

was called a moon.

She was a terror to me.

She was what I had for softness, and she was

hard eerie. Moon conjures

full moon—her nail-whites not gibbous

or crescent but pointed oval, tapered at the

sides to piercey spear-blades. There was so much

sharp about my mother—the claws

of the settings holding her diamonds to her rings, her

occasional tiara, fierce Diana

double sickle, needles up,

setting into the curls her hair

was twisted to evince, bundles of apparent

romp and bounce. Permanent,

the waves were called—and in hell there was the

girl who bit her nails, who munched them like a

porcupine eating thorns.

My mom craved me to rub her back,

she felt my kindness seeking aches

in her spirit, to ease them. I loved to help her.

And now, as I limn her live portrait

with the smooth ease of a ballpoint, the ink

rolling out, the Queen of Night

glides like a gyroscope, slides along

the fine wire of her high note.

A child is a double agent—along my

spine, my mother ran up and down, as a shudder.

Bad & Crazy

At age 5, I changed schools—

Emerstink to John Manure.

The first was down the street, grim

fortress with a charcoal-colored

fire escape, the lightning zig-zag

down the side—I climbed it, one day,

in my roller skates, to hide a bully’s

skate-key. The second school was up

the street and over, up and over

and up—and out of a tunnel, which ran

under it, there came a creek

downhill, between eucalyptus:

sunbeams, and water, and a sand-pebble bed

unrolling a scroll. To move from one school

to another, you had to take a test.

My mother wrote it in my Baby Book.

The test had pleased her. “Shary’s evidently

unusually intelligent.”

And though they did not tell me, in their minds I was no

longer insane, or stupid—

my brain, though odd, could dance like uneven

light on water, my mind was not puke