Features

I am perfectly fine here: ice-choked, 

thin as an eyelash. The bootprints on 

my headboard are getting darker.

The chimney: clogged with fish eyes 

and sea glass. Somewhere my enemies 

are singing to the food on their plates.

As a

It’s where black cats tend to live longer

than their allotted nines, and we avoid

cracks in the sidewalk to ward off whatever

might happen in the whatever places

of our minds. And on certain Fridays

when the thirteenth comes

1. Idiopathic

These rooms never have windows. I’m alone

and waiting, still dressed in the incessant blue

of their gowns. Outside this room, my whole life

swallows hard. My husband paces the waiting

room, flinting his fists.

1.

In which I try to decipher

                               the story it tells, 

this syntax of monuments 

                flanking the old courthouse: 

                               here, a rough outline 

like the torso of a woman 

                great with child— 

                               a steatite boulder from which 

                the Indians