If there was a fist here, give it another name:

a coiled Christmas light, blackened. A prayer,

a spider in the pantry; harmless, unrelenting.

The way love isn’t.

The way a cancer doesn’t know.

It is the one on my lap at funerals,

folded down in a church,

letting some sour God get sick of some sour me.

It is the one that cannot reach my mother

when she cries in the car.

There is a small callous,

unwanted patches of hair,

the stark resemblance to a crab:

all the fixings of a high yella

and a high yella’s daughter.

Everything written is 10 years too old.

A coward, it crawls out of a nail bed

and makes a wrong turn, missing

a chance at the mouth.

I blame the right for every packaged silence,

for every brewing “no,” hammering in the wrist,

for every blood it dreams to expel

in a strained silhouette victorious,

for holding yours, for calling it “nothin’,”

for holding yours, for calling it “home,”

and what a funny happening.

I’ve made two brothers unmusical somehow.

The left is not the same.

It is some woman’s thing used so often

I forget it’s there.

1997

When you’re 5, your sister

will stare only at objects.

The body associates

with like-matter. For a month,

the non-breathing will resemble

a 20-pound girl with a blue face.

Her doctor is a handless blacksmith.

Whatever he administers

was engineered by faith,

is at the mercy

of what you will cling to.

From that time, you will not

remember any sound: your father’s

voice, the axe-picked march of mucus

out of his daughter’s chest,

the doctor’s shuffling steps, (which

you imagine are small coffins, clapping

the way to your sister’s room).

All of these will be hollowed out

for you. The body, for all its holes,

likes to protect.

Your sister’s lungs will be returned to her.

Recovery is a forgetful God. The radio

will become an appliance of torture.

For the next year, you will clap off-beat

to every song. The music gnawing

at the fences around your ears.

hypnophobia

Someone is choking you while you sleep.

Your English teacher. The one who

wears those awful khaki pants that show

his manhood everything. He cackles over

your bed, your skin, that hot piece of coal.

Someone must’ve cut the wire, the one

connecting your brain to your backhand.

Not even an eyelid will save you. He hears

your heart. He can’t stand the pulse of it,

the off-putting way you want to save yourself.

He rolls up his sleeve and tunnels his arm

down your throat, uproots your heart,

says to you, “eat it.”

You are an unstitched doll learning her parts

as she loses them.

I am not afraid of the night. I am afraid

of its obligation: to close your eyes

and unleash that tight fist of knowing.

I could not have been born this way.

For every fear, there is said to be

a triggering effect. Someone holding a gun