Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems

Pickles and Donuts

Pickles and Donuts Cold basements remind me of the dead fruit my mother smothered in sugar, the phallic pickles souring in tight-lipped jars. I keep my school uniform stained, my long hair pulled back tight, my walnut breasts cloaked with baggy shawls, tell my friend next door, about the red jam donut beneath our skirts, teach her the waist-twisting dance of wrapping childhood’s curtain around her body so soon unfolded like voodoo air from an uncapped perfume bottle. I breathe in books that turn my eyelashes to blue feathers, my eyelid’s veins into delicate wing-bones that flap and lift, travel me to an island house on stilt legs. She eats the stone pages of an old Quran, comes of age at dusk where bombs fall on paved roads and the sky rains scalding lava that streams and streams, carries her to the sharp edge of the world. 40 ...