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Mariah Watkins, Neosho, Missuri Imagine a child at your door, offering to do your wash, clean your house, cook, to weed your kitchen garden or paint you a bunch of flowers in exchange for a meal. A spindly ten-year-old, alone and a stranger in town, here to go to our school for colored children. His high peep brought tears: sleeping in a barn and all that, nary mama nor kin, but only white folks he left with their blessing, his earthly belongings in a handkerchief tied to a stick. I've brought a houseful of children into this world, concentrating on that needle's eye into eternity. But ain't none of them children mine. Well, of course I moved him on in. He helped me with my washings, brought me roots from the woods that bleached them white folks' sheets brighter than sunshine. He could fill a canning jar with leaves and petals so when you lifted the lid a fine perfume flooded your senses. White bodices and pantalettes danced around George on my line. He was sweet with the neighbor children. Taught the girls to crochet. Showed the boys a seed he said held a worm cupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set the seed to twitching. Gave them skills and wonders. Knelt with me at bedtime. He was the child the good Lord gave and took away before I got more than the twinkle of a glimpse at the man he was going to be. It happened one Saturday afternoon. George was holding a black-eyed Susan, talking about how the seed this flower grew from carried a message from a flower that bloomed a million years ago, and how this flower would send the message on to a flower that was going to bloom in a million more years. Praise Jesus, I'll never forget it. He left to find a teach that knew more than he knew. I give him my Bible. I keep his letters in the bureau, tied with a bow. He always sends a dried flower.

Watts bleeds leaving stained reminders on dusty sidewalks. Here where I strut alone as glass lies broken by my feet and a blanket of darkness is slung across the wooden shacks of nuetsra colonia. Watts bleeds dripping from carcasses of dreams: Where despair is old people sitting on torn patio sofas with empty eyes and children running down alleys with big sticks. Watts bleeds on vacant lots and burned-out buildings– temples desolated by a people’s rage. Where fear is a deep river. Where hate is an overgrown weed. Watts bleeds even as we laugh, recall good times, drink and welcome daylight through the broken windshield of an old Impala. Here is the Watts of my youth, where teachers threw me from classroom to classroom, not knowing where I could fit in. Where I learned to fight or run, where I zigzagged down alleys, jumped over fences, and raced by graffiti on crumbling factory walls. Where we played between boxcars, bleeding from broken limbs and torn flesh, and where years later we shot up carga in the playground of our childhood. Watts bleeds as the shadow of the damned engulfs all the chinga of our lives. In the warmth of a summer night, gunshots echo their deadly song through the silence of fear; prelude to a heartbeat. Watts bleeds as I bled getting laid-off from work, standing by my baby’s crib, touching his soft check and fingering his small hand as dreams shatter again, dreams of fathers for little men. Watts bleeds and the city hemorrhages, unable to stop the flow from this swollen and festering sore. Oh bloom, you trampled flower! Come alive as once you tried to do from the ashes. Watts, bleeding and angry, you will be free.

Sets the folds in alignment; this a shallow, a constitution of drops that moves to displace itself and unconsciously reverts to image. In such a state, the wave has become a setting— a table across which cups with propositions rolled inside them are passed. The passage of cups does not limit the range of potential outcomes, and yet at no point does the wave dissolve into abstraction. The shades are drawn and we are overwhelmed by flags crossing the black divan. An axis of rotation, gliding a fraction of an inch and yet unveiling its total mass. Advancing, the disc of its body shimmers. Alighting on the sand, it reveals itself in a cluster of pulses. Dilated, it lifts from the sea floor: fine spokes radiating on a wheel. It passes between bands of bright water, a kiss or a plow.

They were sitting on the thin mattress He’d once rolled & carried up the four floors To his room only to find it covered nearly all Of the bare wood Leaving just a small path alongside the wall & between them was the sack Of oranges & pears she’d brought its neck Turned back to expose the colors of the fruit & as she opened a bottle of wine He reached over to a tall stack of books & pulled out The Tao& with a silly flourish Handed it across the bed to her   she looked up & simply poured the two squat water glasses Half-full with wine & then she Took the book   reading silently   not aloud As he’d assumed & suddenly he felt clearly She knew the way Two people must come upon such an understanding Together of course but separately As the moon & the wave remain individually one

I wanted to know what it was like before we had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we had minds to move us through our actions and tears to help us over our feelings, so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her, walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek, and turned my head after them as an animal would, watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts, her smiling face and her small hand just visible over the giant pillows and coat hangers as they made their turn into the empty highway.

The world bends us to its purpose. In the public gardens, we found a “gazing globe” balanced on a waist-high pedestal, a silver ball a foot in circumference, reflecting sky and ground, ourselves as we stood above it. We stared into its depths, as in a crystal ball, our faces large and wild, arms and legs unnaturally small, as if a spell were on the world, or, finally, we clearly saw the world for what it was: too brightly shining, circular, unadorned. Trees bent toward us, mere shadows of themselves, their shadows more substantial than the trees themselves. The sky at one o’clock a milky white, light-filled, yet without sun or cloud. And beds of tulips rising from the groundswell, each one a little mouth. I knelt beside you on one knee, caught up in walls of air I couldn’t touch or see, the outer world around me wavering, as on a hot summer day. We looked out to the future. Our future selves. You stood dead center in the globe and raised your hand to stop the scene, your palm enlarging until it dwarfed the tallest trees. Then waving goodbye, we walked, as a joke, backward and away, farther and farther away— the globe still gazing on us— leaving ourselves behind to live forever in that silver room, to watch and spy on lovers like ourselves.

man, he said, sitting on the steps your car sure needs a wash and wax job I can do it for you for 5 bucks, I got the wax, I got the rags, I got everything I need. I gave him the 5 and went upstairs. when I came down 4 hours later he was sitting on the steps drunk and offered me a can of beer. he said he’d get the car the next day. the next day he got drunk again and I loaned him a dollar for a bottle of wine. his name was Mike a world war II veteran. his wife worked as a nurse. the next day I came down and he was sitting on the steps and he said, you know, I been sitting here looking at your car, wondering just how I was gonna do it, I wanna do it real good. the next day Mike said it looked like rain and it sure as hell wouldn’t make any sense to wash and wax a car when it was gonna rain. the next day it looked like rain again. and the next. then I didn’t see him anymore. a week later I saw his wife and she said, they took Mike to the hospital, he’s all swelled-up, they say it’s from the drinking. listen, I told her, he said he was going to wax my car, I gave him 5 dollars to wax my car. he’s in the critical ward, she said, he might die . . . I was sitting in their kitchen drinking with his wife when the phone rang. she handed the phone to me. it was Mike. listen, he said, come down and get me, I can’t stand this place. I drove on down there, walked into the hospital, walked up to his bed and said, let’s go Mike. they wouldn’t give him his clothes so Mike walked to the elevator in his gown. we got on and there was a kid driving the elevator and eating a popsicle. nobody’s allowed to leave here in a gown, he said. you just drive this thing, kid, I said, we’ll worry about the gown. Mike was all puffed-up, triple size but I got him into the car somehow and gave him a cigarette. I stopped at the liquor store for 2 six packs then went on in. I drank with Mike and his wife until 11 p.m. then went upstairs . . . where’s Mike? I asked his wife 3 days later, you know he said he was going to wax my car. Mike died, she said, he’s gone. you mean he died? I asked. yes, he died, she said. I’m sorry, I said, I’m very sorry it rained for a week after that and I figured the only way I’d get the 5 back was to go to bed with his wife but you know she moved out 2 weeks later an old guy with white hair moved in there and he had one blind eye and played the French Horn. there was no way I could make it with him.

Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey— a real one, on the second floor— and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases. We stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers to get to the candy counter in the back, and pointed at the red wax lips, and Mary Janes, and straws full of purple sugar. Said goodbye to Mrs. Todd, she white-faced and silent, and walked the streets of Beaver, our teeth sunk hard in the wax, and big red lips worth kissing.

The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.

There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender. No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze. Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses, find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs. You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What’s this? You said, it’s mine.