Annie Poems (Pt. I)

So, I'm writing a chapbook with the oh-so-lovely Annie Pittman, and it is a wondrous thing, full of grief and love and family. Here's a few excerpts for you to chew on while I revise my India poems:

[Dear Annie #1]

When you tell me your mother

is in the hospital, I begin the hunt

for bad omens: onions left to burn,

oranges given to mold, sugar

leaking into the cabinets. Because

a bruised peach is no silence.

Because it can be weighed in the palm

and sliced to pieces so inconsequential

you could put them down a drain.

When my father died, my mother

only had to say, It’s Daddy, and I

could fill in the rest—the way he

dragged the patio furniture into the garage

and turned both cars on, the swell

of his body as the gases started working.

Because there is in these moments

a soup-can telephone between daughter

and father, humming with secrets.

Because I can’t tell you when

we stopped being part of our parents’

bodies, but you can still feel

the blood clot inside her

and hear the nurses’ shoes clicking.

Because love, too, comes this way.

I’ve left the bread out in the snow

just so I can give you something

to dissolve in your hands.

[Dear Annie #3]

Today you and I are listening

to a man read about angels and how

heaven is filled with distance,

my hands clasped at the bone

he calls the wild iris of the body,

yours resting on the word joyful

embroidered on your skirt.

Crisis, he says, is a threshing,

a way of separating covers

from what can be made into bread.

In some places, farmers scatter

their grain over country roads

to be pressed open by cars.

Some days you are part of a crisis

and don’t know it, driving

with your windows down

until your phone rings and the air

is too much to listen through.

Other days, you wear bells

around your ankles so nobody

will lose you, so they can

hear the noise of your day

coming through the field.

John said Julie’s tumors

were little bells ringing

inside her that he could hear

even after she died, her body

so unquiet in the ground.

Some days love is a microphone,

a way of speaking across

the great spaces of heaven

and earth and everything

you aren’t ready to hear yet.