In God’s backyard, roosting birds
reawaken the old throes
interred within us
…But for the Grace of God
He’d played on your baseball team one year,
showed promise you never did.
You said you’d lost touch with him
until he turned up
in your English class that fall—
a different boy—withdrawn, thin,
and silent in a room where no one else was
quiet.
Caterpillar
I didn’t ask the caterpillar
with its antennae tangled
criss-cross in a cobweb
if it wanted to be healed,
Decades Later, You Misremember Wildflowers
Maybe it happened like you thought
or maybe you just gathered memories
like a bouquet of shards: glass, plastic,
stone—strewn and demolition-dusted.
Ocular Migraine with Waterbirds
I heard you call my name.
The wire of your voice pulled tight
through the hallway.
A Child’s Grief
We entered Yellowstone, and you gaped
at charred tree trunks,
where acre after acre of still-scarred land
had burned six years before.
Suffer the Little Children
Along the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez,
amid the high Chihuahuan desert,
when bitter winter arrives, asylum
seekers like a Zacatecas grandfather
make coffee in a pot from water
frozen overnight