Gender
(The Box of Broken Toys)
He stretches on the rooted ground beneath a birch
and puts the box of broken toys between her knees.
A naked doll with one arm gone
displays a plastic smile with confidence
amid a wrecker's paradise of matchbox cars....
Just yesterday, s/he finally came to visit,
and after a defrosted dinner, the three of them faced off across
a scarred and varnished table to discuss
the parents' need to move. And then (s/he's thought this out)
while s/he retired to the attic and lay sleepless,
sweating on the covers of a short and narrow bed,
his father died (as they say) peacefully in sleep;
her mother must have come awake to find her husband gone
and did not summon help but lay there stubborn,
demanding that her Christian god should take her, too....
So she or he, their one adulted child
came down the crooked stairs this morning,
to find them lying nearly straight beside each other--
colder, stiffer, than in life-- a knife and spoon laid out for dinner....
Cell phone calls between white mugs of bitter coffee
have set the wheels to funeral in motion....
The parents presupposed the genders s/he was heir to,
the one born into and the one assumed,
but now the parents' deaths reduce all gender
to a child's neutrality. It's just a child who
reaches in the box and raises up the doll,
finds tiny clothing in a metal tin for bandages,
and manages to deck that sexless plastic body for a funeral
in dress and hat and heels. It's just a child,
the only living person present at the scene .
Veils of Water: The 8 Decades of Her Life
she caught minnows in her hands- they died
trying to breathe through a veil of air
a stranded child wades toward a woman
she sees the veiled moon cut into quarters
she meets a boy who lives in his body
with one wet finger he punctures the veil
she kills her insides like a sleepwalking actor
shredding red veils into swirled-away water
a man comes pushing through veil after veil
he moves and she moves a tide in its rising
she drapes a black veil over her bed
she cries for weeks and covers the windows
she disrobes in a room under a cross
her breath is frost veiling the windows
she stands beside God on the bank of a river
and sheds her slack body like a veil into water