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I am walking through water with one of my sisters, the river banked with tiger lilies, the sun like having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dog ecstatic behind us, and I am yammering about my discovery — a chest deep pool, sentried by trees that caterpillars were killing with their yearly carnival tents. We reach then ruin the pool with oils and shampoos. We scrub too much skin from our heels, then debate whether to sunbathe naked: that is, who is hiding in the woods. We joke so long and rough the joke morphs, till we’re practicing for our future rapes: we both have numbers that we know are up. My sister’s ears are speared with porcupine quills and steel, but she’s placed her straw hat carefully over her stomach. As she talks I watch while dragonflies and other less showy insects land on her burning shoulders. The dragonflies present their stenciled wings. I can’t remember what the others do. My sister spits to clean each sunglass mirror. She wants me to hear how, when it happens, she’ll do this scream — but when the scream comes it’s just like she’s opened a shaken bottle of sparkling water: I am speechless only for the view of   her throat’s cushioned corridor. But when the scream ends her eyes have broken off from the rest of   her face. She takes our green net bag full of oranges, and slams it down on the baking rocks, beating the ground till the oranges soften and streak the air with the smell of   their breaking.

I saw how beautiful your mansions are — Your lakes and valleys and your peopled plain, But thought of  all that loss with all that gain, And one geography is not enough. One world, one world to loose the spirit in, Will not contain a continental ghost. I have a dream of   islands drunk and lost, Of   cities shining with a ripe decay Where old ships feed about their harbors' knees, — Far, far beyond your small and private seas.

The great pulsation passed. Glass lay around me Resurrected from the end. I walked Along streets of slate-jabbering houses, Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject Prayer, my prayer as well: 'Oh God, Spare me the lot that is my neighbour's.' Then, in the upper sky, indifferent to our Sulphurous nether hell, I saw The dead of the bombed graveyard, a calm tide Under the foam of stars above the town. And on the roof-tops there stood London prophets Saints of Covent Garden, Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead, Hyde Park Corner, Saint John's Wood, Crying aloud in cockney fanatic voices: 'In the midst of Life is Death!' They kneeled And prayed against the misery manufactured In mines and ships and mills, against The greed of merchants, vanity of priests. They sang: 'We souls from the abyss To whom the stars are fields of flowers, Tell you: Rejoice in the abyss! For hollow is the skull, the vacuum In the gold ball, St Paul's gold cross. Unless you will accept the emptiness Within the bells of foxgloves and cathedrals, Each life must feed upon the deaths of others, The shamelessly entreating prayer Of every house will be that it is spared Calamity that strikes its neighbour.'

Family, lover, colleague. Notions, veneers, nation. Teeth of no health insurance. A boom can be a microphone affixed to a pole and not an explosion. Shadows, we sweep at them constantly and on the table is chocolate, newspapers, commentary, and vastly different pay stubs. I lean in to you and wish to love you perfectly. Suffer, tumble, strive, the right shoes, and vacation. At the table, conference and always pretty, the fixed. Shimmer of repulsion or fairy tale of cleavage. I count pleasures like cream, sipping, speaking. I like fashion as well. All the hymns you and I know as his headboard knocks against our wall, the slap when he coughs, our neighbor. The most racist of all positions at the staff meeting is to tell us about your shocking talent if there is a most. A prayer dangles over this bitter. Looping coves of sympathy. How to history. My flat speech in variously adopted professional tones. Merger of you and me and take whatever you want. Her beautiful poetry face. His intellectual arms. I worry about the ferocious place in you while framing it. A person as diversion, a thing beautiful, a small green-blue egg in a spring next and now the field is gendered. Have you seen the moment of last light? It means something to me. Assuming my gender qualifies your hearing and therefore my speech, you overlap words with mine in what appears to be a neutral manner but your speech acts as solvent. Down the hall, high heels as metronome, watched. Out of our bodies comes speech as clouds, flag, windsock, bandage. Dear— You could make more money if you wanted to. Such as a day of beauty, persuasive levels of caring. For example: doing both brow and lip. Are you spending or quiet? Let’s go to lunch would mean exchanging speech and then carrying warm food in plastic bags. Coherence as my mother sleeps after a complicated surgery. And if I were, would you be generous with me as well? Race ran the organization which one. We socialize in this real estate of gerrymandered potlucks. I think there exists silence as a legitimate response and I will say that now. The caring for our souls by old black women in the narrative of a college president, passing. Excuse me for not knowing passing. You remember but only after the spine is broken. Something in chemistry called suspension equals your ghosts caught in my air. The Bronx is horning was a line they wrote where I was educated, teaching. Response to migration: the pullback of the form remains as a hum, a tongue.

Some people like to relax and kick back with their friends just talking and having a drink which is obviously highly pleasurable. Some people like to be entertained by music or a movie; some people like to make some jokes with people they like, maybe at a bar or at someone’s house. Some people like to lay around with another person, just touching, or to prepare food, alone or with others while listening to music that they feel a particular affinity for. But sometimes people like to thrust themselves into the howling wind and snow, arms tied behind their backs. I prefer to open my mouth wide open knowing what will happen if I’m just holding my mouth open, ready to respond or yell or whatever seems appropriate. You know, I keep my mouth at the ready to make a lot of noise. And sometimes it becomes filled with hard packed snow or with sand, sand being more of a problem, since, you know, it won’t melt.

With swift Great sweep of her Magnificent arm my pain Clanged back the doors that shut my soul From life.

Release, please, this bound one by the power of your right hand. Receive the song of your people, exalt us, Lord, and make us pure. Almighty one, protect those who seek your oneness: Bless them and cleanse them—bestow upon them your merciful justice. Mighty one, holy one, in your goodness guide your assembly. Turn, sole one on high, to those who remember your sanctity, and accept our cry and plea— You who fathom all mysteries.

One teeny tiny worm making the earth turn.

The first time I touched it, cloth fell under my fingers, the frail white folds softened, demure. No burn, no combustion at the touch of skin. It sat, silent, like any other contents of any other box: photographs of the dead, heirloom jewels. Exposed to thin windowlight it is exactly as in movies: a long gown, and where a chest must have breathed, a red cross crossed over. The crown, I know, waits underneath, the hood with eyes carefully stitched open, arch cap like a bishop’s, surging to its point.

When my grave is broke up again Some second guest to entertain, (For graves have learn'd that woman head, To be to more than one a bed) And he that digs it, spies A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, Will he not let'us alone, And think that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their souls, at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay? If this fall in a time, or land, Where mis-devotion doth command, Then he, that digs us up, will bring Us to the bishop, and the king, To make us relics; then Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I A something else thereby; All women shall adore us, and some men; And since at such time miracles are sought, I would have that age by this paper taught What miracles we harmless lovers wrought. First, we lov'd well and faithfully, Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; Difference of sex no more we knew Than our guardian angels do; Coming and going, we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free; These miracles we did, but now alas, All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.