beat, her pulse big through the speakers. We listen

until the seats fill, until the floodlights come on

& she speaks, Welcome, this is my body, spinning

slowly, her palms upturned

My brother builds a wall of airplane glue around his bed, the fumes become

dreams as they harden, our mother reaches a cool

washcloth to his fever, the sheet sticks to his body,

like the canvas that forms a balsa plane

Welcome, she says, this is my body, says circulation & her veins

light up like sick rivers, says skin is a door, her hair

molded plastic, her lungs filling blue, her eggs lined up

& waiting, even her bones glow, the marrow white fire,

like a flashlight held in my mouth

When she died we knelt at the coffin, my brother reached a hand out to her

cheek, she’s not even real

And Then, And Then

As a kid I ruled, God Almighty, but it got

so tired. I delivered newspapers, had a route.

If it snowed my mother would drive, I’d read her the headlines

as we idled between houses.

I read about a man who ate an entire car, bolt-by-bolt,

& another who ate acid

& freaked, landing in jail

where he gouged his own eyes out. I thought

he looked like Jesus, but a lot of people

looked like Jesus then.

Patty Hearst was robbing that bank, & Nixon

was led away by the Army. Sometimes

before I’d make it back to the car she would start to drive

slowly away, and I’d have to jump in on the run, as if I were

a cowboy, or a gangster. I told her about Superman,

how he’d plough through the crust of the earth for a handful of coal

& compress it to a diamond between his palms,

his blue muscles straining.

I was saving money to buy her a new car.

Now it’s a story I tell backwards.

Across from me on the train a man is having a dialogue with himself,

saying, I got money, you think I don’t got money, shit,

I’m waking up tomorrow morning, going to work, I got

money, I can leave anytime, I got a hundred places to go

My Mother Contemplating Her Gun

One boyfriend said to keep the bullets

locked in a different room.

Another urged

clean it

or it could explode. Larry

thought I should keep it loaded

under my bed,

you never know.

I bought it

when I didn’t feel safe. The barrel

is oily,

reflective, the steel

pure, pulled from a hole

in West Virginia. It

could have been cast into anything, nails

along the carpenter’s lip, the ladder

to balance the train. Look at this, one

bullet,

how almost nothing it is—

saltpeter  sulphur  lead  Hell

burns sulphur, a smell like this.

safety & hammer, barrel & grip

I don’t know what I believe.

I remember the woods behind my father’s house

horses beside the quarry