The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize,
believed in the third and fourth eyes, the eyes in
the undersides of leaves, the polar bears a thousand miles north,
and sprouts of grass under the snow. They knew their poems
You knock on the door but nobody answers. Cupping your hands around your face you peer through the side-panel of frosted glass. A kettle is whistling, a woman singing as she sets the table. This is a familiar house. You knock again. Inside, the sounds are festive. Glasses clink and a band starts up. Pressing your ear to the door, you hear the sound of your own laughter. This is the house you grew up in. You're sure of it now.
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it,
his deaf son who slurs his speech.
Dad taps the page, says, try again.
Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it.
I was a kid other kids’
parents gossiped about.
They told their children
what I was: too negative.
I get it. Fair to fear
contagion of bad attitudes,
to think naming a thing
can be an inoculation.
Of course my friends
filled me in. Of course
I took my diagnosis
lying down on mostly
frozen sand. Loose
grains made their way
to my scalp. Stayed there
You’ve changed.
You used to be so
and now you’re all
like, you’ve transformed
I don’t know how to describe
it’s like
you don’t like canasta anymore
you text IN ALL CAPS
your selfies are so
animalistic
like, are you out to prove something
you’re a lion
you’re a bear
you’re a maggot
you’re a virus
I just don’t know
if we can be friends anymore.
We were a conflagration asking
to be incarnated into the world.
Mother, superstitious, kept us
apart, two stones of the same
igneous anger.
Everyone saucered tears
like firetrucks before a plane crash,
as if preparing, should we combust.
Mother had once hidden
all the nooses, knocking
all hanging hooks from our ceiling,
the other family hid the tinder and wood,
crying flame-retardant
for the walls.
Your palm prints have returned
as shingles around my left eye.
The hallway is an empty
riverbed, smooth and barren.
At three o’clock classroom
doors open like dams.
Gullies of teens stream
out, to become one
flowing body. A torrent
of fauxhawks and ponytails
channels along the linoleum.
The drowned boy floats along
just below the surface,
caught in an undercurrent,
bobbing past the
sightless stares of teachers.
My father threw his language overboard,
a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:
small hard bodies.
My mother hung on to hers —
Wove the words like lace, an open web
over the window, light caught on the edges.
My daughter is starting to pick at language,
names at dawn – dog, star, mumma –
alone in her crib, learning the edges that will mark
meaning, create borders.
I'm trying to find those words of my mother’s,
When I was five I was put on a bus
and sent to Catholic school
not unlike my mother who was five
when she was put on a train
and sent to residential school,
both feeling that gut feeling
that this was not going to be
a place we would like.
My parents told
my older sister
to watch over me
but she had long ago
grown to not like me,
let alone protect me.
As we waited to go in
that first morning
a group of boys decided