The lessons we learned here (fumbling with our lunchbags, handkerchiefs & secret cheeks of bubblegum) were graver than any

We used to meet on this corner in the same wind. It fought us up the hill to your house,

In the chest is caged bat who seeks escape through the mouth. He flaps his wings & the molars shiver.

Out in the world, the child cries for the mother as the wound cries for salt as the lover cries for her unrequited lover

. .Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when… and tangled in a woman’s body? —Virginia Woolf Every month,

You call me courageous, I who grew up gnawing on books, as some kids

At the edge of the body there is said to be a flaming halo– yellow, red, blue or pure white,

Cement up to the neck & my head packed with unsaid words. A gullet full of pebbles, a mouth

All night he lies awake tuning the… tuning the night with its fat crac… with its melancholy love songs cro… across the rainy air above Verdun & the autobahn’s blue suicidal…

I was sick of being a woman, sick of the pain, the irrelevant detail of sex, my own concavity uselessly hungering

You gave me the child that seamed my belly & stitched up my life. You gave me: one book of love poem… five years of peace

On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

You operate on the afternoon You perform open heart surgery on the ghosts of your suicidal friends You divorce your parents

Living in a house near the Black Forest, without any clocks, she’s begun to listen to the walls.