from: evidence

18-19

flash-lit on the stair

worn feet

balance on worn wood

my scarf by energies of want

slips from my head’s crown

leaving a salty braid

across my back

exposed —

this, our pantomime

is fixed

unlike my name

too quickly chalked on a leather case

that will unravel weave of hair, the hide

Isolation Unit

The sky at twilight is a smear. She would fly, back to her people. Her refusals are reasoned. She will not wear stripes, marking her back like a picket fence. But she will hurry, as she rises into the gray, which is somehow reassuring. She can look down on what she is given. There will be work, in one room, day or night unknown.

20.21

a promise doesn’t make

my foreign land

domestic the chain around

my neck gold or what

I have

more than felt ornament, child

on hip an uneasiness

her weight against my spine

shifts as I walk

and the coin

sewn safely in my hem

knocks against my ankle bone

here call this arrival:

to take a seat

in cold cell, holding

Mouth

Roundness doesn’t reveal. Perhaps a sign, such wide-openness. Quality of lip, vocal cord. What she wants to do with sound, that is undecided. First task, an open take, second task, determine if blessing or beseeching the unknown. Whatever the shape, sound is to be made.

54-55

the cross of avenue and alley

is held in prayer to a saint

whose name is not yet spoken

as I grind the blade push the cart

of fish or to please

a stranger in a fine new coat

take his photograph

Voice

She knows her voice will change. It will slow, as her arms slow at the end of the day of crating and hauling. The sound will certainly coarsen. She should sing more. To sing away the threat, to find solace in echoes.

56.57

this broom (treasure) sweeps

everything

and when there is no longer

any ashiness in my circle of concrete

I can sit

to (magic, protected)

count the buttons on my shoes

one by one though no one asks how many

even when I look above a horse’s head

to vendor, friend

or why I call in quiet

do you want an inky sheet of print? do you want two?

Pyramids

She builds the pyramids, stone by stone. She dams a stream with twigs. She digs potatoes, fingernails turning black with dirt. The dirt stays, the potatoes are eaten. The stones are filed into blocks, the blocks laced with rope and pulled one atop another. The dam does not hold. Sand blows into her mouth, grit settles and cannot be rinsed out.

70.71

though I cannot clearly see the feathered curl

selected

I can fashion it from memory and need

so your hat might be an elaborate one

that I will notice on the street, passing

you, just how you wear it with economy

in the style of chair and bench

table under one bulb my apron dusted with down

Twists

It is possible to obsess about work without working oneself into obsession. She thinks about this, though carelessly as she walks. Her walls want to be covered with mysterious marks. This is part of her planning, but she can’t read her own notes. Scrawl, scamper. Her imagined bookshelves reach from ceiling to floor, hundreds of books stacked like upright bricks, shelves dusted daily by a stranger.