“I’m related to the earliest of times…and to the latest”* for Charlotte Mae b. May 2021  Because I’m wrinkles & funk away from her new skin and scent, I think first of Charlotte Mae every morning upon waking with awe and a kind of envy. I wonder what is she thinking? (if thinking is something a barely days’ old can do)—more likely she is  f e e l i n g  that breeze that has brought her to this particular peculiar where she’s already aging, aging being the only note I can whistle with any certitude. How soon will I have to tell her the only difference between her double…

  Measuring Love Everything I love fitsbetweenme and what I fear:famines and fires,cities burningrumors, feasts before dark.Flags and floods andHoly Thursday. What I want,no abacus can calculate,no clerk in the citycan bring to me.Through the gratingin my bedroom wallI smell the lime tree dying,plates of cake rotting in the heat,the death of garlic.The burglars of the sunhave stolen ripe peachesfrom my father’s tree.The white promise of the moon remains,immutable, translucent overhead. Each bent and damaged detailof family matters. The list beginswith Grandma whistlingand a worn yardstick standingin the corner of her sewing room,the faded numbers calling my name;she’s measuring the hemon my first pencil skirt,green as jade. At the end…

  The Singing Because the halo has descendedto your hips                  as light                                     on the horizonthe sky around your headcloses in in green—             moody muddy green— and your feet are the sizeof small fingers              somehow on the ground                                     where you stand—voluminous              billowing in a black as soft as clouds below the flower—…

  At Eighty My neighbor the painter doesn’t know me anymore. Recognizes his wife sometimes—a glimmer as she guides him to a chair, puts a piece of apple in his hand. He doesn’t say much, but when I hum an old song, “Tea for Two,” “My Romance,” he sings along. Where do the words live inside him? He still works some mornings, though his pictures grow smaller, lighter. A few faint strokes—pale green for leaves, petals yellow-orange—as if saying, Fine, enough, you know what this is.   Anything More She’s caught a little off-guard,I think, since her left shoulder’s backa bit as if she’s still turningtoward the camera, and a…

  Wynn-Dixie We pulled off 95 south in the hot night drizzleto sleep in a Wynn-Dixie parking lotbefore driving again there was one other car across the lotrusted and still, as if it would never drive again   the highway foamed where we left it,drivers kept spiriting themselvesdown the warped corridor   at three I was barely sleeping, the heat,the fizzing lights of the Wynn-Dixiespread through the wet air   at four I woke to a voice,a humming engine, a door slammed,—do you need anything? it asked   I woke again to more voices,doors, and engines—car after carstreaming into the lot,they parked, got out—adults, children, familiescalling to each other  …

Offering Walking down my street at dawnanother broken bottle smashedin a neighbor’s driveway.Shards of clear glassscattered in starstrembling in first light, tossedfrom a moving caror flung downby the drinkerat his very own feet.I look down at the wreckage,up at a tree,pink petals pushingout of its bud tips,then double back homefor broom and dustpanand begin sweeping.It takes a long timeto pick the tiniest bitsout of the asphalt,carrying jagged fragmentsback and forth to the recycling.Who knows why but thismakes me stupidly happy all morning.   Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press) and In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press.) Her poems…

  Earwig Night creature, like the guy in the bar—leather jacket, black pointed boots,sloshed, body slouched againstthe grease-stained wall, but willing,oh my god, to follow me home,too drunk to know what he came forexcept to say, you know you’re meantto love me. When I laughed and locked him out,he sat on the stoop in the rainaway from the streetlight. Leavesfrom the only tree on the streetfound him. I said I’d call the cops,he crawled off covered in leaf litter. Earwigs here hang out under leaf mulchin the dark and rain. They clump togetherwhere the sump pump drains cellar waterinto the daffodil bed. My son dubbed them beer weaselsafter finding one…

Psychopomp Perhaps life was meant to endlike this: fisheyes spiralingacross the caution typeface,the steady burn of diodescatching in stucco nooks,bungalow doors gnawed.The slender digit gnarledsnug on a Glock’s cold, wettongue. Like hollow-pointgold          that flowers carmineout sagittal crests, thefangs bared from jaws of a dog,smoke-hued and rattleboned.The coming spell of comitycindering in your sclera, lungs.Someone collecting the mattercharged on grass & sidewalk,someone emptying your dozing headback into shaky palms of a loved one.Someone to desperately offer warmth,offer your molt understanding:this is not just pattern, this is ageless,it is ritual. Animals extolling earthshine.But there is no moon, no stars,nothing but owl song, the scatterof a possum, the quiet…

  To My Neighbor It’s almost Easter herein Elsewhere and the machinesare doing all the work: washing, sweeping,   heating still while I haunt my homeuseless as a second thought.I will never reach the end   of this novel. I will fail to emptythe diaper pail. I will eat lunch standingover the sink and it will taste like   nothing at all. Even the excursionsare broken. The highway turnsand clovers over and under   and over. At the filling stationwhile the car fills itselfI will pass once more   on the opportunity to wipethe beetles from my windshieldin favor of staring south   and if a stranger were to ask…

Tomato Skins My mother called and said a tiny flapof tomato skin was stuck inside her throatthe way a child who crawled too far might beIrreversibly encased in a mining shaft.Portable generators! All night stand by!I don’t believe she ever again trustedunpeeled tomatoes. A day or two after,she called to tell of watching a butterflytunnel through her garden, and how a jayswooped in and netted its flightin a perishing knot so deft as to yankinvisibility: now that my mother’s dead,and I don’t have to call her once a dayto see if she’s clamped down on somethingunextractable, some taut tarpaulinof indissoluble paradox, I remember how muchshe wanted at the end to…