it seems, because of the approaching storm.

The water turns field and beast, like the mind

which is also like the body: tractor of memory

raking the ground you become when loss,

proof of your heart, confounds you. Another dives.

I can’t remember what it feels like to snare

my tongue in someone’s mouth, or the date

my grandfather died. It was a Tuesday

in September. My mother woke me from stilted sleep.

Pelican chicks dive so deeply inside a mother or father’s

gular pouch the chicks were thought to be

cannibals, feeding on the blood of their parent’s breast.

To my right, lightning like a thought cut short.

From far away the pelican spots the menhaden,

which my eye can’t distinguish from water.

I get no further than the question. A cold wind

rushes from my eyes. I go inside, shut the windows.

Why I Left the Garden

After I lost my breast, I became a woman

sutured by a kind of knowledge.

All day I moved as if walking was no diff rent

from falling. I owned the pot holes

and the riddled sky. I owned nothing at all.

Even from far away,

I could hear the record skipping.

Time was running out

of hands. Of faces.

The first time a lover traced

my scar, fingered its river

and kissed its groove, I woke early

the next morning and, quietly, I left.

After the __________, I mothered my mother,

became grandmother to myself, distant and tender,

temples turning gray. The whole world cascaded

past my shoulders, like the hair self-hatred taught me

to crave—though all my Barbie dolls were Black.

And the Cabbage Patch Kid my grandmother placed

under the artificial Christmas tree, sprinkled with tinsel,

in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where my mother waited

for her first pair of glasses in the Colored Only

waiting room. She said the world changed

from black-and-white to Technicolor that day.

My mother watches TV as I roll her hair. She sits

between my legs. I’ve never birthed a child. I have

fondled the crown of a lover’s head, my thighs framing

his dark brown eyes. I entered the world excised

from my mother’s womb. Her scar is a mark

the color of time. I am my mother’s weeping

wound. On my last birthday, I cried into bathwater. I hid

my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.

Facing Off

I feel naive when I think of it now,

how carelessly I stood before him,

like a ballet dancer in a dressing room

bright with the backs of other girls.

This was before the coldness he nursed

and kept warm between his thighs.

I waited too long for a thaw—he waited too.

Taking him into my mouth, I knew the ache

of winter. I heard the silences

grow as a field of stones between us.

When I look back at my body, young