she did not care if he was Christ, for in her arms he was her son, and she loved him, and it was all that mattered or would ever matter, she looked at the babe still smudged in viscera, her blood, and he was of her blood, and she loved him, and in her love he was of God, so was she, Mary was of God, and she felt God in the heat that flowed from this child, she felt God in the pain she bore and her emergence victorious, no one dead, not her, not her son, and for this miracle she would call him Jesus, and she pressed her lips next to his ear and whispered you’ve saved me from death, you’ve saved me in your love, i will love you more devoutly than anyone now and forever, i am your Mother, i love you, i love you, my son, i will always love you

some of the river

She looks into the flat silver river surface, millennia ago,
to see if she is beautiful. Forgive the outmoded feminine

attribution, the suggestion of hypersexualized vanity
the tired notion of female vacuity

but also fuck off, voice in my head,
polluting the surface of her flat silver memory

looking in the glass
to confirm she is beautiful

that everything that touches us leaves a mark
even the moving hand over moving water

even my mind with its judgements
a bird that flies over and over without landing

An Anthology

I could not wash the sweater vest I used to scream at him

for lying on, since it is all that remains of the dog.
I tried to toss it in with the non-delicate but stopped

when I brought it up to my nose and breathed again
his tangy urine, fragrant air from an innocent tail still in motion.

What memory will shake me if I clean it? My only memo
came from the masterful poet who said if we write

about our dead dog he’ll ban us from the anthology.
I would have screamed at him but I let his wife do it,

as he listened humbly in a scrubbed sweater vest,
to the high pitch of her voice, in the stink of the past

and who can blame him? Not the dog. Not me.

1 from a series of 4, this is a visual found poem (graphite on paper) assembled from sentences in letters/texts/emails written between an ex-partner & myself during a long drawn-out breakup.

ramune and lavender
jawbone with zero and kim kardashian

kim kardashian with stained glass light
umeboshi and psilocybin mushroom

amber and salt lamp
night light and pink wax

pear and white lime
pearl wool and corn syrup

stopwatch and sheep teeth
sapphire and tire track