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Your husband is a drunk. Get out before the past reminds you of the pain you suffered as a child. Don't let the past repeat. Go now and get some help. You can't do without help. When your husband is drunk he can't help but repeat what happened in the past to you when, as a child, you had to bear the pain of drunkenness; the pain requires that you get help, in order that your child does not become a drunk as well; do not repeat what happened in the past. So leave behind the past; move forward, through the pain. The past will just repeat until you get some help, so leave your husband, drunk, and get out with your child. It's not fair to you

my secret love (the soul, the life, the sweet) you make me sing a song of sky and wonder when will i rise, my secret love, and bring out the story of you (are the moon and sun) and (your light glancing off me and my secret love, boiling at the core) i will never be your world

I marked a little cross in my Hymnal every time you would say, “Play this one at my funeral” -- the best times were those jocular Wednesday evenings, pounding out the same old anthems in the catacombs, across the empty nave -- euphony be damned, the congregation would get their earful Sunday morning. Ten years after, estranged, but caging your heart always in my obdurate heart, I weep when they forget to sing ye holy angels bright, ye blessed souls at rest -- they say you have no need -- but I am standing in motes of dust from all your ceramic cherubim, singing hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, knowing all this time I s

Nearly certain- footed, my rangy drink of water slips by faith over the high wire, the twisted rope aiding her ascension. Grounded in grace, known to be known, she steps, she swings out on her tether -- falls back, halts; catches herself.  She steps again, feeling the slack; steps again, growing a little lankier in the harness. Size nine feet find the platform. Dominant hand held behind her back, she clips claws in place, shouts out her love for me, for me, and she shimmies off to the forest morning sky.

Shit rains down on you in this game if you break through enough walls.   Six weeks in, I trip the brick that sets you off.  I can see liberty sleeping in my bed and doing its laundry. The sky darkens, like turned leaves and guppy water.   I peer at your voice and flick my wrist, and flick my wrist, and flick my wrist.   I pull another quarter from my pocket.  You give instruction sometimes, sometimes sit on a bench doing your chem lab.  The sky falls. I do your laundry, and liberty's, and my own, changing twenties to quarters, playing while I wait for the sheets to dry, never hanging anything on the line, bracing myself for the rain.

I build my poem with words upon words, a stone upon a stone upon a stone. My poem grows the seeds for a thousand fruit trees, each tree with its words, each word with its stone, each stone with its seed, a poem upon a poem. To get my poem take down a stone, take out its seed and plant it.  Flesh comes from the rock, water like a stone. Go stone by stone, seed by seed. Gather the fruit.

You are a week-old mother marking time until the baby falls asleep, doing laundry and dishes, rocking and jiggling, feeling nothing. The phone rings:  DEPARTMENTOF YOUTHANDFAMILYSERVICES: your heart quickens. They tell you to stay put, they will be coming over.  In no time, you see the car in your driveway.  Your stomach lurches, and you startle at their knock. They know, and they tell you so. You can't figure it out -- how they found your secret heart, the darkest, most invasive terror -- but you give.  And they take. Your freedom, your autonomy, your independence, your self-respect. They send a lazy little aide to watch you watch your l

We two were separately and completely in love with the bad apple, the shiny boy who, garlanded with her veneration and mine, plucked and hoarded every blossom in his the mucid closeness of his gym locker. Knowing this, we all embraced together and kept silent. When the petals changed to reeking black, and were clammy enough to adhere to the body my friend and I severally craved, he turned them out onto the floor.  Falling forward, the bad apple rolled around in all that slimy detritus.