Poetry

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned..."

Mother, you are my dream scroll...

dear nobody, I have taken drugs to calm the pale pearl faced woman with red hair that lives inside me my sweet mania (you saw her briefly, fled from her open legs) I had to lure her with the glassy green globes of chloral hydrate, drape her in the dark mourning of depression and as

  words like black blood from the frozen ground: a psalm and twenty years later you still dream of your childhood house on fire you turn to me for all of the things i can no longer give you the names of streets or of old lovers or the reassuring weight of lies and everything

Just before I reached puberty, my Maltese father told me, “A woman is like a cow, always with one eye opened and one eye closed.” And I wondered if he’d meant only my mother. Just before my wedding day, my father told me what he’d meant: “A woman always pretends she can’t see anything, but