circles her own mother, who is made

of whatever makes a shadow thin

and ungraspable. She wants to touch her.

The bones under my mother’s skin—ribcage,

scapula, spine—feel like sharp winter rain.

Between the clouds, I see a patch of sky, glimpse

my aging body: moles like a flicker

of paint, undersides of half-covered breasts,

patches of eczema my fingers soothe

with heavy cream. Is this what a laying on of hands

means? Once my mother touched a garment

and said, full of an awe full of sadness,

She touched this, her skin was inside of this.

My mother’s back shines

like the hands I wipe on the towel’s face.

Weren’t miracles always beginning this way?

Aubade

after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)

My back is turned from him again,

but this time I’m not hunched

over the quilt—his rough thumbs

gripping my waist—I’m standing

in the middle of a room constructed

with pencil, adhesive, and paper.

One foot in the basin, I will scrub

his cigarette hands and yellow eyes

off     y skin. I will clean my sex

and start again. Another will come

and I’ll forget the coat hung gently

on the hook—diff rent than the way

he took me. He shook like a startled

fish caught in a great blue heron’s beak.

Yes, a woman of my kind

has seen the sea. The first time, I gasped

at its glistening mouth.

Endlessly the waves replaced themselves.

I launder my nakedness like a uniform

with water from the pitcher.

Soon another will arrive who I will

wash away. There is a man who dares

to face me, he considers

every angle. He built my form

with precise lines and foraged scraps

of brown. From the harsh shape

my elbow makes, the builder knows

this is a portrait of work,

not pleasure. I love how softly

he touches me, though all I want

is to be left, to spend a morning in bed

alone with the images of dream.

A Family Woven Like Night through Trees

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

Robyne, who, when someone hurls

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

New Yorkers on New Year’s Day or on the first day

of spring. Not children I’ve birthed, but dead

leaves raked into prickly hills, made messy

with our falling. Artists skinny-dipping

in the ocean at night. It was family

that surged and fell away. But the ties

my grandfather wore on Sundays are kite tails

in my closet. The mums my mother planted

are tiny, decadent flames. Family returns

like a son, the way a wave is always and never