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Who won? I said. The game’s tomorrow, he said. And I became the snail I always was, crossing the field in my helmet. But I’d given it my all, while the plane arced on its way to a landing, when I overheard the woman behind us say I was gathering wildflowers to make a wreath to lay on my mother’s grave when my son fell off a mountain in Italy

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to right from the beginning—a relationship based on good sense and thoughtfulness in little things i would like to be loved for such simple attainments as breathing regularly and not falling down too often or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed how superbly situated the empire state building is how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you part of me fears that some moron is already plotting to tear down the empire state building and replace it with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being in the right place at the right time—come take your seat we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm, this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall, this heap and toss of fabric and strewn shoes, this tangled beauty, this I came here not knowing, here to be torched, this fumbling ecstasy, this ecstasy of fumbling, this spray of lips and fingers, this scrape of bone, this raid of private grounds, this heaving and rocking, this scream and push, this sightless hunger, this tattered perishing, this rhythmic teeth knocking, this unbearable music, this motionless grip, grimace, and groan.

Make your mind what you want it to be. —Curtis Mayfield Tired of waiting for him, I think of a plan to stick it to the Man—he waylaid me with promises: protection, his valuable keys. Nights of seduction, I would glide to the curb in my customized Eldorado, black finish and cool bubble top and turn it over to a superyoung girl with rags and a bucket of soapy water, with a smile and a dead president,make it shine my sister. He is inside listening to Curtis, his sapphire ring he brings the moon with him, this cat, and his eyes glow like mellow stones at my superfly threads. The cashmere white stitched suit, the maxi coat trimmed in fox fur:vixen, my pretty little hat with three blue feather plumes. I let him dig me for a while, and lay a kiss, a spoon of cocaine on him, our secret meetings a potent rush and I am hip to the hit to his fly hand on my thigh, my ladies scatter in a cloud of Opium and he tells me, you know me, I’m your friend. I thought he was my man—I flash on him in the bathtub, its ledge of oils in flasks, pulling a loofah sponge over my tired shoulders, passing a reefer in lemon paper, on all the tired bitches working his keys, hustling his diamond rocks— two sets of false eyelashes, micro minis, freezing their asses off. My .25 Beretta can’t stop him, it’s not real, I’m not real to him. He’ll use me up and kill me; I need brains guts and cool; I put fur on your back, my baby, he says. I am between him and death,the greatest high of all, and I ask him to step outside. The pink flakes blow my mind and I turn to him with a flurry of karate kicks, kicking out my left leg I bring him to the ground and with my foot on the collar of his mohair suit I tell him, I took your money and signed a contract on you:I hired the best killers there are— men like you—yeah, if one hair on my gorgeous head is harmed, it’s all over for you. It’s all over for you, I think, as I imagine I am Superfly; my mind is what I want it to be, the Man is tired and suddenly he looks old, very, very old as he turns away from me, the things he cannot dream— my brazen plans, my body full of love.

Her sense of smell is ten times stronger. And so her husband smells funny; she rolls away from him in the bed. She even smells funny to herself, but cannot roll away from that. Why couldn’t she get a more useful superpower? Like the ability to turn invisible, or fly? The refrigerator laughs at her from its dark corner, knowing she will have to open it some time and surrender to its villainous odors.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? Berkeley, 1955

My father at the dictionary-stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word “Carnation.” Then he bends So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, “The obligation due to every thing That’s smaller than the universe.” I bring My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle’s eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X. My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I Can give no explanation but “Because.” Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does Where following each X I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, “A pink variety of Clove, Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.” As if the bud’s essential oils brush Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors,Child, it’s me, He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud: “The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.” Then twice, as if he hasn't understood, He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.” He gazes, motionless. “Meaning a nail.” The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail, I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth “Beloved,” but my needle caught Within the threads,Thy blood so dearly bought, The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own, I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, “Daddy daddy”— My father’s hand touches the injury As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.

My brother, in his small white bed, held one end. I tugged the other to signal I was still awake. We could have spoken, could have sung to one another, we were in the same room for five years, but the soft cord with its little frayed ends connected us in the dark, gave comfort even if we had been bickering all day. When he fell asleep first and his end of the cord dropped to the floor, I missed him terribly, though I could hear his even breath and we had such long and separate lives ahead.

One of her hands one of her cheeks lay under, Cosening the pillow of a lawful kiss, Which therefore swell’d, and seem’d to part asunder, As angry to be robb’d of such a bliss! The one look’d pale and for revenge did long, While t’other blush’d, ’cause it had done the wrong. Out of the bed the other fair hand was On a green satin quilt, whose perfect white Look’d like a daisy in a field of grass, And show’d like unmelt snow unto the sight; There lay this pretty perdue, safe to keep The rest o’ th’ body that lay fast asleep. Her eyes (and therefore it was night), close laid Strove to imprison beauty till the morn: But yet the doors were of such fine stuff made, That it broke through, and show’d itself in scorn, Throwing a kind of light about the place, Which turn’d to smiles still, as’t came near her face. Her beams, which some dull men call’d hair, divided, Part with her cheeks, part with her lips did sport. But these, as rude, her breath put by still; some Wiselier downwards sought, but falling short, Curled back in rings, and seemed to turn again To bite the part so unkindly held them in.

prays for birds before an ancient icon— a stray cat. The inbred need to pray is what makes God necessary, and not, she says, the other way around; beyond that it’s all mystery, so don’t question why Man creates gods that demand sacrifice, condemning mortals to spend their lives trying to praise godhead into mercy. Better instead to ask the frog to bless the fly, and, once the cheese is in the trap, to beg forgiveness from the rat.