darkness. We make of our vision: knowingness.

It’s love the women and I make. Love fashions

our sight. We drink from the Waters That Were

Once Snow. We are quenched and we are thirsty.

Bathers with a Turtle

Three nudes crudely drawn. One crouching,

back turned, right hand feeding the turtle

of the painting’s title; another sitting, as if in a chair,

head bowed, eyes downcast; and a central

figure, standing, chewing her hands. My hands

want to take hers—wet with spit, nicked red

and bitten—into mine. It’s her ugliness I can’t

resist. Or her misery. My gaze keeps returning

to her haunted face: how she is consumed

with herself, how she consumes herself.

It’s the kind of dream, every dream, when all

the characters are you. There’s something

I’ve been gnawing: some fleshy part of myself.

It smells like dirt puddled with rain. It boasts

cartilage and fingers. It drifts to my mouth

like a cigarette, a habit. My father is an addict.

He crouches inside me, back turned—it’s been

years since I’ve seen the scars on his cheeks.

He feeds the part of me armored with a carapace.

As a girl, I savored beer he sipped

from a sweaty bottle. I drank what he off red—

not caring if it reminded me of piss—

the glass rim warm with breath. I tasted

what would sour. When I was an infant,

my father softened grapes with his teeth. I ate

from his fingers. Still, though they fed me,

I do not want to hold them. The seated figure tucks

her hands between her thighs. I want to kiss

her knuckles. What I could have been, what I could

become, and what I am squat—naked

and shivering—in the air-conditioned gallery.

All the green and blue mixed to make my flesh.

The guard signals for my attention: Move back,

Miss, behind the line, you’re too close to the painting.

Slow Drag with Branches of Pine

Here I am, holding one more

mirror. This time smoke, winding

like a river. I close my eyes,

not because the smoke stings—it

does—but because it’s a way

to examine myself, like looking

at your face in a river certain it is not

your face. The smoke combs

like a mother through my hair

or like searching the shoreline

for shells unbroken. I sing to myself

and the smoke drags my voice on its back

just as the breeze heaves it.

Here, in my half-singing,

I’m reminded how to slow drag.

I watch the pine trees creak

and sway. Here, I am

my own twin. I rest my cheek

against my cheek; I barely move at all.

Lotioning My Mother’s Back

Because she lives alone and my hands reach

where hers can’t, she asks of me this favor.

It is narrow and soft, my mother’s back.

When I massage in small circles, my mother