The hot summer long —we loaded truck beds with   watermelons, our rough hands soothed by   the cool green rivers in their skins,   then stood guard, armed…

  Fear made us little children: If they catch you, they’ll cut off your nose and ears. If you’re a girl, they’ll rape you. So out of the cave’s bombed…

                       mistranslation after Rilke   When song arrived like an ungainly bird, the light inert, the light wide open shut, the…

                       mistranslation after Rilke   So, the king of the chipped glass departed, and all of his overgrown trinkets— the hart,…

  Many things are love, and failure         is one. And metal, and salt, and                        …

                                                           …

  for Alan Soldofky   A slick slug comes to glisten in the ear. It slides where once a wary owl would perch To scan what seemed an overlay of…

  for Billy, Nikki, Josey, Rosie, and Pearl   We drink good whiskey under the magnolia trees, talk about how the dead can’t see how great life gets. What a…

  Because you swarm when the sky turns heavy, we call you thunderdoll and kill you to protect our thatch   then we snap your heads and slip them in…

  like a flower that only opens at night. Call it moon vine: only flower half the time.   Blossom unfastened by absent light —how withholding spins   desire. What…

  It was time to build the trap, so I sat on the bed, watched, didn’t help, as he fashioned it. Tested the tension of each line, formed a ring…

  Enslaved people’s quarters, Woodlawn Plantation, Virginia, 1820   We lay side by side in the heat, in the night’s palm, the dried sweat of day thick upon our chests,…