SOLSTICE
She is happy her father has come without excuse.
Against glowing moths and Milky Way, they collect
flashlight, matchbook, the box of fireworks.
And since he is happy, they sing and arrange
cardboard tubes, volcanoes named jade garden,
butterfly burst, stairs to heaven
in the middle of the gravel drive –- silver
and orange fountains repeat and fizzle.
The girl hops and gasps. […]

RAPUNZEL
She married the one back home instead
the son of a farmer
heir to a kingdom of tobacco and cotton
a man with broad shoulders and few words
and a farmhouse embedded like a stone in the flat endless fields.
She binds her hair now
safe from the grasp of tiller and plow
a heavy rope coiled at the base of her […]

December Wind
Last night I dreamt I was bleeding,
two cold gushes down my thigh.
I woke up thinking, yes, winter is coming—
winter and my son.
But tonight it’s only wind
hissing something awful
and I see my grandmother
before she died, gray lips open,
the softest moan filling the room
then ending
and I can’t believe the wind is coming
from the earth I have […]

The Geese

Still, the sun contributes its honey
and a large raindrop magnifies the thin branch,
here, where I am, and where my mother,
many miles away in her kitchen,
is quietly aware of each

as they pass, over flat land and long grasses,
the lone, strong, open-branched tree,
and the rain that […]

THREAD
When a friend says her youngest just left
for a job in Manhattan,
I think of my girl on the verge
of middle school, the necessary
journey every morning.
I’ll stand at the corner
as the bus yawns open its doors
to deliver her into its chaos
of warmth and noise
where I cannot follow,
the spool between us spinning
and spinning, unrelenting
rotation, the thread
growing longer […]

POSTCARD TO MY SISTER FROM RUE DE TURENNE
It’s gray again and I feel I could do anything today; gray takes the edge off, softens the world, makes me feel invisible, invincible on this bench beneath a canopy of old poplar, eating pain au chocolat, shooing sooty pigeons from my feet. A miniature street park, […]

BELONGING
this is how the mind works: it sees colors
sometimes not registering the thought.
the indigenous poet was constantly
asked where she was from, her aztec cheekbones
suggesting an unknown. you see the other
cannot walk around just being, the other
has to check a box or the one
won’t know itself, the one’s primacy will be
challenged. this is […]

Sleepless
Twenty minutes to midnight
the frogs are still calling
and somewhere in the far distance
a woman is flinging clothes
into a suitcase. Her shoes
echo like gunshots on the tile floor.
In my sleep I am forever
counting the times my parents
have left me alone in the house,
the frenzy of my fingers reaching,
the deadbolt drawn back
with an unexpected snap.
Ann Walters lives […]

AT THE WIND TOWER, ATHENS
Finally they go in contrary directions,
east and west, each breezing
into the life of someone else.
And even then each remembers the same scenes:
the dip from snow into the hot spring,
the hotel room in the blue-olive-tree valley,
the tzatziki and wine under a string of lightbulbs,
the wedding band thrown at him in the parting.
The […]

Isabelle in Sienna
Stomping on thick short legs up cobblestones as large as your feet,
glued to my hand with gelato, you bellow the Sesame Street theme
song—Sunny day, chasing the clouds away! On my way to where the air
is sweet! Isabelle. Ah, Isabella! Bella! Bella! say the museum guards who gather
around you—young women, old men, fellow citizens […]