which it utilizes for protection

well, me, too—

I take her in to ward her off

•

There is also trickery in the case of the Photuris firefly

who at times sits on a blade of grass, responding

to male fireflies with deceptive flashes

mimic deceive devour

like legend like fairy tale

like office copy-room

•

Regrettably I’ve never sat in my backyard the night before

heading off to Belize

unlike Professor Sara Lewis

who found herself

—instead of mulling over coral reefs—

espying firefly sexual selection and

comparing the winks to Darwin’s thesis on

male displays of antlers and feathers

though it is true that at the book launch where Harold read Bestial

I took note of his commanding backlist

•

Lastly also like fireflies what I cook up

can present an unpleasant meal

although mine does not glow

although I wish I could produce glowy things

—sestina, sukiyaki, manifesto—

However, like firefly glow

I turned on during courtship Harold said so and

he himself is brilliant

especially at nightfall

—though not from enzymes in his tail—

•••

charms iv.

Nip in the Bud

Pull out a Queen Anne’s Lace

By every gnarled tendril

To hone your skill at tatting

As well as thwart a rival

•

Reprisal

If a sweetheart aims to stray

For a neighbor’s tryst

Find a way to shake a branch

Of nettles on her sheets

•••

Foreign Body

This is a poem on my other’s body,

I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one

who saved her braid of blue-black hair

in a drawer, I mean the one

I could lean against—

against as in insistence. Fuzzy-dress-of-wuzzy

one. Red-lipstick one.

Rubber-gloves one. Her one to me,

bad-ger bad-ger

or so I heard. The one body I write on—

her sun-flecked body

as she bathed in the afternoon.

Was I five? It was Summer.

Then Winter—where today

I call the unlocked bathroom to mind:

I cannot leave her body alone.

Which is how I found Mother

escaping the heat of a 1950s house,

Father on a ladder with blowtorch

to scrape the paint off the outside.

•

badger badger

•

The sun in those suburbs

simmered the tar roof over our rooms

in the town where the wasps lived

inside paper cells beneath both eaves and roots.

They sing—

I mean—sting very much, the wasps.

•

Now I’m sixty. Sweet as dried papaya.

My hair, a bit tarnished,

my inmost, null.

Memory is falling away

as if an image shattered to shards then

re-collected for a kaleidoscope:

I click the pieces into sharp arrangement—

bad bad girl girl

In turn, a daughter turns sovereign.

•••

After Being Asked If I Write the Occasional Poem

After leaving Raxruhá, after

crossing Mexico with a coyote,

after reaching at midnight

that barren New Mexico border,

a man and his daughter

looked to Antelope Wells

for asylum and were arrested. After

forms read in Spanish

to the Mayan-speaking father,

after a cookie but no water, after