slimy & joy-wet. you're night's work of art, hatched from nothing into the belly of a jaw—softening the hard ground of language. your pronouns: ruffled between edges, as the heft threatens to refund your mother in past perfect tense. my tongue, raised towards your image—spills the purple consonant where a curve ends. say, I howl into wetness, shards of you grieve out in thanksgiving. you, scolding bronze into portrait. light waylays me, till I whiten & duplicate. whiten & play …

I always questioned who my father was before the hair decided to settle between his chest, Before he was sentenced to manhood, Was he a believer of far-off things? Would we have been friends? Did he fight for possession of the brownie whisk with the entire fist of his mouth? I wonder if on his road, He carried his hopes in his bindle, And if he will ever get around to leaving them wide-open again. Dad, You are a mighty thing of your father’s distance and your mother’s vocabulary, But who …

As frail as I am with my bandaged head my stumbling abnormality of gait I can still lift my son a leg up into the crotch of the Kwanzan cherry. I can still wrap my one good arm around his waist and heave. I can stand there at sunset spotting him in his tiger-faced rain boots his firefighter’s costume complete with helmet and ear-piercing red whistle (the hatchet had to go). Where low sun gleams in the eye of an exoskeleton a tiny mirror of cicada reflects the setting sun and worn- out father …

To be old in the time of disease is to be angry for the crushed wren on the sidewalk; for the resurrection lily, its stem bent by the storm; for school children who carry their nightmares in backpacks; for the dead tree in my yard waiting to disintegrate; to be angry at liars who ignore courts and recounts; for hungry families without three full meals; for women with more babies and less choice. I wait for hours of music to wrap me, tickle my ears, awaken my soul; for raucous evenings, family …

all this time we were seated for our own share of the light now it doesn’t matter how much furrows are set in our butts today I unthink suicide I uncork my body into the arms of morning sun & fall back into a garden of lilies I’m the chips & also the ketchup I eat the sweetness out of myself into myself here it is: the delicate art of unspooling in a birdlike motion I love the way my body loves me we think we’d walk into a …

I lean behind the wet leaves to pluck what I think I see— a wild black raspberry. Thirty years of picking distills in my hand; I’m confident I can eat what I find. I lift the vine above my head to shake away the rain, pull off the dark caps lined in honeycomb. Leave the rest for next week or after. I hear myself, decades back, prickling at the thorns I’m happy to know as I retreat. A mile on I lick my palm where the stain lasts, a useful dye. Sandra Marchetti is the author of two …