Summer

for my daughters

1.

It was a fine web of fish, it was a burnt glow like a skull, only smaller, dry as the face in the grave, the nose the first to go, the nose and the penis, which nobody ever sees again.

2.

Ripples of flesh the way it feels on the ass of your lover. I want to go into the dark but it's too sunny here and filled with birdsong. They call this place Friendship, for Pete's sake.

3.

I need the pomegranate darker, to slip inside the cave the way the tiny dusty bugs - not even bugs - bacteria - the way they slip in through a single drop of moisture. They're landing on us right now as we walk into and through the cave, photographing, trying for metaphor.

4.

The pores become more obvious, each seed, each tiny corrosion. Corrasion, they call it in a cave: the way the cave is formed; every bird chirping around me and the water against the shore, that glub and gulp of the lake, the sound of a boat engine dying.

5.

The face of the cave with left eye partially covered. Purple laughing eye - couples holding hands, men with cameras. Ahollow hole of a nose.

6.

They said she had strangle marks on her neck. They said she was always bruised but that her sons heard nothing. She said: Why didn't anyone notice I was gone?

7.

A long low day and the end spirals up. I am leaning on new ropes that stretch into the lake.

8.

They found a body in her backyard. The boys had been swimming above him in the new pool their Mama bought a month ago. They'd waited for warm weather and it had finally arrived.

9.

A crime reveals itself gradually, in waves, each day another artifact of the event washes up. A man is dead. A woman is incarcerated. We all have stories. This is mine.

10.

A plundering birdsong.

11.

The boys thought the police were feeding their mother rats. She was allowed a phone call to lie, for they have fed her nothing but rats for five days now, have not allowed her to shower, have hurt her in countless ways, but not as much as her boyfriend had, nowhere near that much. Jail is a lot better than she's used to in her orange jumpsuit, in her reincarnated self.

12.

What appears shut may be open and what appears dead may rise from the lake.

13.

I swear those two robins sat in the road and looked at the sunrise together. I heard the dawn coming, the bird noise was so loud and so ravenous, I left my bed where I'd been reading since midnight, and came outside to see.