my mother carried around
soft & heavy on the bottom
I would crinkle & shift
in her young, tan arms
if I was set down I’d lean in-
coherently to the side

My grandmother dies
on the solstice, window
scrimshawed with frost.

(1991) I came upon a gray whale carcass along the shore, its body fouling the
littoral. Flies and flags of hide girdled the whale’s bones. Muscle and blubber
foraged.

Almost the end of an ER
night shift. My neck aches
from craning over a toddler’s
dog-mauled face.

I am reminded of something that does not exist:
ice and frostbitten waters, shipwrecks, a history
of cold. My brown fat cannot stand the cold.

Ice is not a living thing, she claims. Yet
it splits wide, open, cavernous.

The Mother’s Cupboard waitress slings breakfast burgers to linemen
yawning before their shifts. I’m touch-starved, picking at my home
fries, sipping coffee after night shift at the bakery.

The first art might well have come from forced breath
spitting hematite onto the cave walls. First, art makes
a fist. What a model a fist is.

mom brings buckets
saltwater never seems to tire
one pink pail after another
trip number ten

and hit her head on the edge of a table
I lost my car at the mall where I stopped
to buy a white board on which to write