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Houseboys

Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.

How Do We Bury the Dead

How do we bury
the dead stacking up against our picture window?

How to Live in an American Town

You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.

How to Read a Poem

My advice would be not to trust. The ocean is just the ocean until I say otherwise.

How We Handle Pain

How We Handle Pain

Lily hated Ray’s cancer. She couldn’t see it or cure it.

Hugo on Harris

He had come to weavers’ Harris to make some testament.

Hunting Season

Each year we fail to imagine how the days will blanch, the air will harden.

I Carried My Father Across the Sea

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

I Did Like Butter

It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.

I Miss Somebody Still Alive and Other Poems

On Saturdays I listen to folk music, lead a life devoted to exodus.

I Would Have a Woman as Real as Death

I give you a real blue song the mountains hold under their foot.

If All the Birds Are Killed

A rider prances toward the ash, a sailor looks for meaning in unrequited hearts.

If Holden Caulfield Were a Mother

Children can be seen as worldly things, not as souls with broken mirrors.

If I Die in a Combat Zone

I want him to remember me hanging on his crosshairs.

If It Ever Happens That the Fire Goes Out

A cuckoo calls the hours like an old clock, only not the hours we mean.

If the Body Makes a Sound

Silence, a weapon of choice, hung between them, cut through the air.

If the Shoe Fits and Other Poems

What if white men became supremely good at making up for our past?

Immortality

In Custody and Other Poems

Make haste, my love, I am redrawing the scale of escape.

In Eulogies

When you are a father, want sons. There is some math in this.

In Love

Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.

In Passing

The ashes of a human being are not ash. The body burns into wood.

In the Land of Long Distances

Another year another almanac, a washed-out castle in the sand.

In the Museum of the Americas

Divorced. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child.

In the Region of Ice

He’s an excellent student. It’s just that . . . he thinks ideas are real.

In the Shadow of the Glen

It’s other things than the like of you would make a person afeard.

In the Water

It lay slumped where they’d dragged it, a fright of an animal.

Independence Day and Other Poems

The old-timer outside the guard station was knifing his own tires.

Inevitability

He picked up the knife I had there, and said he’d kill me if ever I told.