Marrow

When the contractor began flattening the fields I had sold,
he turned over a small cache of bones.

From my back porch I saw him remove his hat, pull
his browning hand across his forehead.

He tossed the bones into the woods and leveled the spot,
prepping it for concrete.

In the dark of early evening I scooped up the bones. They were light
like bread and cold from the wet earth.

I warmed them in the oven of my palms, wondering if once
they were worn down by hours leaning into an axe,

or perhaps from grinding against a mortar to resize corn. They
could have been the foundation of skin, hope and tendon;

they could have belonged to the builders of pillars, of stone
circles, of sacrificial mounds, of children.

As I laid them down, I saw a body loose and those bones poking
through the skin like the skin was shale;

as the meat of the body moved down the shaft of the bone
like a candle melting on stone.

After Choir Practice

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Sonnet 73—William Shakespeare

While the congregation cooked barbecue, the youth sought
salvation behind Sunday school doors.

There the girls and boys welcomed rug burn on their palms
as they practiced voices in bass.

Tomorrow their backs will flower
irises beneath their clothes.

In a year some will marry below those same rooms, a few
because of those rooms.

Most are yearning to be spherical; to have and to
mold; to sing in the ruined choir.

To the Fat Girl at the YMCA Pool

You think you have breasts
because you wear a padded
bathing suit; a woman’s suit
with strategically placed
tropical flowers,

but your pre-puberty nipples
only stand up like diligent
erasers because of the fat
pressing beneath them,
not because they have
expectations of boys; of
babies; of want.

You lumber after your friends—
one in a Hello Kitty suit, the other
in a blue striped one piece with
white appliquéd flowers.

Out of the pool you pull—
pull on your jean shorts
over your wet, thick thighs.

I want to tell you my secrets:
to play small, to towel off
behind curtains, to ignore
the places you can’t

quite reach.

Winter on the Coast

The curves of the river cracked
under our Wonder Woman boots.
We threw rocks at the opaque ice
(a risky divination) as we marched
across the Yeopim River in red
and white power shoes until
we saw more than trees.

At the bridge that opened sideways,
the river merged with the rounded
Albemarle Sound with less ice, more
slush. With cold feet, we disembarked,
5 miles from home.

5 miles? We couldn’t have walked
5 miles! I thought even though I knew
the odometer always ticked up to 5
miles when we road the car across
the bridge and into town.

We were sweaty, our breath puffy,
but I couldn’t believe 5 miles!
I wished for a warm car with a black
control panel full of tiny white
numbers floating up in sequence.
Or the invisible plane to carry us
up, up and inland.

How would we get back? The ice
was now more black than the
sturdy white of early morning.
We couldn’t take the roadway.
We were only 8 and 10. How would
we know which left and rights
took us to our house? How could
we now walk up to the bridge
house and ask to use the phone?