Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him

Dawn again and the birds of oblivion sing
of all hungers

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”

Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian

rinse one another with buckets of water,

I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,

A long exhale at the end
of a hyperventilating season.

In the shadow of the June sun, I accept my fate.