Shaped

We live in houses shaped by the song of airplanes.
Think of your body as glass
and when it breaks you understand.

Our dinner table is in the street.
We pray in the street without food.
We purr like dead bracelets to what god made this.

We live in houses shaped by war, by the teeth of war,
and we are happy to sit through anything,
filial teeth of war.

Huddling girls clog this city.
We hate them. Who is calling for their son?
Who left us here alive?

Who was cruel enough to do that?
I'm looking for my son.
I use a wheelbarrow.
First his arm.
The wheelbarrow
is heavier
than his arm.
His clothes are
on the roof.
They don't
smell like him
anymore.



I Do Not Love the Pail My Birth Dropped Me in

because the holes in my body are on borrowed credit.
The oval of cognition, fickle as a coin-draped sky,
scrutinizes my forehead. Drowning becomes a daily fix.
I struggle to keep afloat in spite of myself.

Up to my nose in profit, the minutes glue together.
The pink above is ripe with airplane bellies, crawling
with silver bacteria that I cannot reach.

I am the pail of my birth. I live wherever I am carried.
I cry Swiss tears. Poplars refuse to blossom in my footprints.

The animals overflow the country with their stench.
The farmer rapes milk from his cows.
All conceptions permit a lottery of ingratitude.