heartbreak glassbreak

heartbreak, glass break

it's goddamn hard here

even when you're not alone

sweep up the pieces

guess i'm going on 

sharp edge glitter in the dustpan

blood slick in my hand

floor's sticky with spilled wine

how you doing sweetheart

one day i'll be doing fine

heartbreak, glass break

sweep it up the best you can

dump the pieces in the garbage

go rinse off your hand

how you doing sweetheart

we do the best we can

blues for the children

Can't get back my baby

No matter what I do

I can't get back my baby 

No matter what I try to do

Whole world full of children shining

All I want is you

Fed my baby peanut butter

Fed my baby rice and beans

Can't put meat on the table

Can't grow backyard greens

Fed my baby peanut butter

Bills past due again

Want to burn that goddamn schoolhouse

Want to burn it to the ground

all those broken window schools

Just want to burn them down

Want to pack up all my babies

And leave this goddamn town

Five dollar bottle 

couple gram of weed

Gonna buy myself a bottle

and a little bag of weed

I might as well buy something 

I can't get what I need

Look at all the pretty babies

In their worn out tennis shoes

Look at all the pretty babies

Makes you want to sing the blues

Whole world full of children

All I want is you

I can't get back my baby

No matter what I do 

I said I can't get back my baby

Baby

No matter what I do

question

How is this world good? How right?

the best of all possibilities 

of being,

the only way to gather up the threads

of all these lives?

Shall all be well?

Lord, through what dark and bloodstriped door 

are we borne, wailing

into a life of grace?

Must it always be this: the crushing, and the grief?

Are we, altogether, so stained

that only death makes way for better life?

Is this faith? To ask, at last, that we be eaten up

by our own appetites, by our own wounds

to make a place for better life?

Is our painful death a gift for what comes next?

You Who demanded the children too

be consecrated 

to You in death

even the children, Lord, 

and the beasts,

You Whose Name is mercy--

You do not let us forget it, 

they are written into scripture,

how Your demands glittered,

unrelenting,

biting and breakable as teeth.

I would not see my people crushed,

our children lost--

Is there no healing? 

Is this our last best hope:

A god who sees, who holds each tear, and who ordains

no less pain

I make my claim

against your righteousness: 

I rest

my case.

a birth day

Once on the day after Christmas I lost an earring,

half of my Christmas present, a little smiling kawaii squid

(this in the bad old starving days 

when I was a girlshape made of brittle glass,

I wasn’t sad

I wasn’t sad)

it slipped out sometime that day—

when I was pulling espresso shots, ignoring 
the cramping 
and the clotting—

or maybe later at the clinic.

I don’t remember their faces, 

just the white coats

the necklace stethoscopes

they said any residual tissue would be 
taken

lab tested

I guess they sent us the papers

later

I was too numb then to ask 
for the scraps 

so we left 

bereft 

All I had of you then 

was my lost earring 

Later you gave
your first 
last

best 

gift:

the glass cracked 

that night 

we cried,

I cried

I could never have been your mother

I tried

I tried

I think that I was born then,

when you died

introspective. ironically.

When grief grew too great, a grey weight on my chest
that crowded out first gratitude -- then hope -- then breath --
I buckled. Grey pavement scraped my knees. Blind,
I lived alone with the grey weight on my back, the cloud
crowding my mind, seeping to poison all my bones.
Crushed there I took your trade: new heart for stone
 (I could not pay).

This heart, I thought, receiving it, is strange--
not crushed to coal, to diamond, to blank inturned rage
but crushable. You could scrape this new, soft heart
on toast -- strawberry jam -- You wouldn't even have to chew
to eat this heart. So permeable, April-full. It felt
like the pink space when your tooth came out,
in second grade. It didn't hurt (not then), but it was tender,
strange.

It is a heart, I thought, for rest. For joy. For peace --

Oh, it is scraped and sore. Pinned onto promise and belief--
raw, nailed to someday rest and peace.

My own stone heart locked up my private pain
my own walled world. There is no lock on this You gave.
There is no skin. I might be changed
into a sponge. My eyes are lidless, wide. I drink
more tears than I can count.

Yet soaked, this heart grows broad with sorrow shared--
and grieved hope grows its roots deeper in God.

Drowned, then pulled up, I thought to gain relief,
but find a heart enlarged holds larger grief.

birthday

In spring you shared good news--
two babies! Due November --
like a plate of freshbaked cookies.
New life is sweet in the mouth,
brown sugar and vanilla.
A taste to savor--
God is good
Taste, unseen, eyes built,
fingers unfolding,
the knitting of new bodies with new souls

Summer brought figs and wasps.
Untwinned, too, one twin
One sister, to be born
half of a pair--
What memory of sister cells long melted?
What redseamed and burning loss
sewn up in every stitch of joy?
May I beside you drop my tears
for these dear twins
Purl tears, still, for that pearl
that little lump of cells
they took--
unfingered still, and unfarewelled--
in glass
away--

The birthday--Ruby Mae!
Born in November
in a cold far place,
a white gray winter
To know you hold, at last, the small bright crown
to nine months' long ring of grief and hope
Touch her fingers.
Hold her curled into your shoulder--
We unwrap your news like early Christmas
bright with red ribbons.
Is God not good? 
The tears we paid seem guarantee
of days and years thick with sweet memories--

Till an imperfect heart's small raveling
surgeon stitched, still opens
and opens, and opens
its unstoppable switch: breath
to emptiness.
We watch ribbons spin and shred in a black sea.
Was one not enough?
Something beside you--faroff
in my own gray home
I share the indignities:
mucus, tears, acid
puncturing the days with its
unbearable taste--
 
Dear friend,
Let me sit down with you
at this bitter plate.
To weep
and hope
and pray.
God is good --
To believe, together,
that promise,
that unshakeable one day.

baby

New grief sat sharp in my mouth
a thinedged stone
or broken glass

it pressed heavy on my throat
i could not swallow

Like a lost tooth
or a sore new wound
i probed it

Scraped it against my tongue until
spit and blood filled my mouth
bitter

until i learned its edges
until its edges (week by week) dissolved
in tears

sometimes i almost forget
grief worn smooth and warm
round and creamy as a pearl

i Tell it now like beads
with prayer, with thanks
this precious sweet small grief

$fifty

so what if this woman gets raped God
you know He had nothing to do with that
jesus standing there crying behind His eyelids,
Oh honey, you know I didn't mean for that to happen, why
Can't we all just love each other like I do
My yoke is easy and my burden is light, you know
I would never ask you to carry
that, and
it's your body not that poor
bastard's not that maybe baby's and it
probably would have had something wrong with it anyway
so many of them do
Oh honey I don't want that for you
nothing but a baby yourself, go
Get you that fifty-
dollar unbaby off the shelf

The morning after

I want a baby

I want to finish my degree
I want an internship with a company whose name you've heard
I want a career where I can make a difference
with my unique abilities
I want a solid paycheck and the opportunity to advance and a nice bonus twice a year --
I want a good career

I want a long-term live-in with a good career
it doesn't have to be as good as mine
a man who appreciates what I have to offer our partnership
Who pays the check and opens the door and buys me a dozen roses twice a week
I want a platinum engagement ring with three diamonds, or heck, six or even nine
to show everyone how he feels about me
I want a wedding on the beach in Maui with vows we write ourselves and my college roommates carrying lilies and all the songs they played on the radio when we were first dating --
I want a unique and meaningful wedding

I want my own house
I want a big house in a nice suburb with a little yard and a dog
a fluffy dog that stays indoors and doesn't make too much noise
named Margaret or Jenson
I want a gym membership and a treadmill upstairs. I want a gameroom and a TV in every room and a two-car garage and three cars and easy recycling and a water filter and a four hundred-dollar composting system that doesn't stink. I want organic vegetables and pedicures and hot yoga and fifty-dollar face cream when my face starts looking thirty --
I want a nice house

I want a baby
one of each
I want a girl who will take ballet and grow up to be an empowered young woman who loves herself and speaks her mind
I want a boy who will play teeball and baseball and football and grow up to be a sensitive and caring young man
I want a college fund and a prep school fund and a private school fund
and a preschool fund
and a fund for dance class and taekwondo class and sports camp and horse camp and music camp
I want SAT tutoring and iPods and iPads and the right clothes and Disneyland vacations --
I want a baby,
later --

I do want a baby

heartbeats

I keep a box with your heartbeats
at the back of my closet
buried under too-heavy sweaters
my most uncomfortable shoes

sometimes i hear them anyway
your hearts, beating away
doubletime, mouse hearts
little bird hearts

I thought my heartbreak
would drown them. Still
they go on drumming away
with their own impossible life --

I need

a bigger box
a bigger closet
a bigger house
to hold you

I did not have room in my body
for you, little mouse,
little birds, I do not have room

I am tired
of hearing your heartbeats

28.12.2011

This is a small sorrow. Already
i sit bonecold,
unbroken

Tremble: black coffee a
welcome jangle in an
empty--

This is too small for heartbreak.

 Two days. Already my breasts
have lost their ache,
have shrunk unneeded to their
small untenderness--

(Tonight i will drink red wine.
A whole bottle. Two
if i want them.)

Oh small small grief
oh little bittersweet:

you sit across from me
you will sit there tomorrow
you will hold my hand tonight
and cry brief tears.


We are left heartwhole, barely
touched by that
small soul.

Left so little to remember--
just this day, wintercold,
black coffee,
sour on my tongue.

The second portrait

This too is a message --

We have forgotten how to read.
See only stars --
We track the tides and storms
map different routes to work.  

We have forgotten how to read

the secrets of an opened bird.

The ancients with their magicians,

their calendars and instruments,

were wiser.

In the East and in the Americas,

in green Egypt, in their temples,

their eyes grew deepsouled from searching.

They read the circles in the world.

These lives we live now are circled too.

We live within one age:

another will succeed it.

After winter, always, there is spring.

Everything bad is a sign

we have forgotten how to read.

When landmines are sown

and reaped

when women and children are raped:

Read.

These are the death throes are the birth pains
the end of an age --
The entry to a kinder, wiser world.

We will live, then, more soul and soul.

Anyway that’s what I choose to believe.

It’s a more hopeful way of looking at the world

(we have to live in it)

Sugar

Sweetheart, they call us, honeybunch
sugarpie. Us women,
where i'm from.
I'm as Southern as any Southern girl
but these names rankled.
Endearing, perhaps,
undeniably trivializing.

I thought:
Is what we are to them wrapped up
in such toile-patterned packages, such
sticky diminutives?

Now i am a wife.
My husband has his names for me,
not sweet, i am not at all sweet, i am not
sweet to him:
only old men who don't know me call me
(call all girls) Sugar--

Now i have been a mother.

I have been your mother. I felt
the world uncurling in my womb:

Now my baby done left me, i can't find
no sweetness any more

It's still good, this life, it tastes
like wholemeal bread
like good brown rice.
It's just

you were my sugar.

My little chilli pepper

my vinegar pickle

the drop of perfect honey on my tongue.

Goodbye, lullaby

Goodbye baby,

gone to grace

out of my body.

Save a place

beside you

till i come.

Though i be waiting

long and long

till i come home, dear,

i will come.

Whatever years

are set to pass

may you and i

grow in grace,

grow in love

for Him we love.

You were a gift,

a pearl, a rose.

I do not own

nor would i wish, dear,

to steal your love.

Your body,

your small heart,

were never mine.

But i am yours:

i was your mother,

for a time.

Little rosebud,

you were housed, dear,

in my skin:

I was your bread,

i was your wine.

You breathed my breath.

Your life in mine

was a rich gift.

And at the end

my blood washed your flesh.

i own no part in

your small heart.

i carried you
for a few days--
carry you still, but

it is not your face

i shall best love

when I come home.

But i shall love you, dear,

when i do come.

Little gift, little pearl

you were not mine.

But i was, dear,

your mother,

for a time.