As Mourning Doves Persist

Her hands run down the hourglass of my back. Tracing the flare where burrowed absentee tension coagulates. Washboard. Bath water, Blackboard burdened with layers of letters and calculations never entirely erased. We share answers to questions only asked by strangers who after four visits will never see one another again. She strikes a lighter, sucking oxygen from small glass cups that I cannot see, and attaches them to my back hovering above my bruised ribcage. Fascia ripples, letting down like a lithely inhabited village where our grandmothers still live, agile in their afterlives. Her black hair is pulled back from her face. I really only know her voice now from a warm table in a narrow room where, face down on my stomach, my neck relinquishes to the kneading. The name she gives to the tight spring under my right arm just at the webbing of shoulder blade and first rib is wholly new to me. Swans, her therapeutic lyric. I try to swallow the minute fountain th...

Mixed media by Erin Curier In our house there are books on books on every table and bedside stand. Books about the Roman Republic, silhouette of a bronze wolf. Tablets of poems crafted in long pipes like periscopes that you tell me you don't follow. A copy of your own novel holds a permanent corner of the round table - city of Buffalo in the rain. Blue stick figure notes dissect a yellow pad placeholder. An entire lecture series beacons we sit up and take notice. Anxious underfed p opulations balance on the head of a pin,  hitchhikers. I eat fettucini with green clams while reading midday, flip through saucy paragraphs, thumbing paper like garlic skin that sticks to skin. Lemon pepper punctuation. Monsters and friends spill from the orange cover and spine as I press down cautiously for fear of leaving clues on fresh snow and in the gutter of glue. Dedication like a large horse of a dog in woodblock poised in the foreground of a black forest. Secondhand Baldwin catches...

for Bernard We are misfits. We fit. Two halves of separately shattered plates. We've risen from central and north and stalk our disappointments on intelligent wheels. Today we are smart alecks, flirtatious at best and mean at the wall.  Twin siblings of different smoke stacks.  When our houses burned down we ate rubble just to claim a righteous plank chair in the small holocaust arena.  You once wore your clunky metal halo screwed into your neck and thick head, ducked for signs. I polished mine when no one was looking and nailed it to the front door like a year-round wreath warning anyone who could not pray to not get too close.  All these crooked years later your deep voice is still tempered with mischief. I cock my ear to listen in symphony.

After the collective reading, mixed bag, the visiting poet laureate speaks to hangers on, his right hand holds his cheek as if he needs perhaps, a cigarette. I wonder if it’s the Rocky Mountain altitude or remnant alcohol that stakes him, dreamy and distanced, even as he stands present as if imported, fragile. Wearing the anticipated blue-gray, he pours critique and future itinerary while around him the working hosts break down the folding table and chairs. Our tired stares transport us temporarily out to sea in this landlocked state. Still, I wish that I was standing on a remarkable table elsewhere, reading bawdy song, advocating we set fire to the menus, all too familiar now. May the river of collective angst and honor take to slicing rich portabella mushrooms, grill steak, and listen instead to our wise children populating contemplative classrooms in another city, making tiny documentaries of what they see on the horizon in front of them.

As we drive straight home again, five hours crossing, you remember the moments when your father began to hum in the car. Passing an invisible ditch or bridge. Coming home to this far northern tent pole of Oklahoma. Not my mother then but a girl upright in the backseat. Temporary shelter on wheels with hard back book spine companions. You listened, on alert because your mother knew just when the homesickness would fade and the whistling begin and she signaled with a whisper. Soft grin on the preacher's face. Her nearly perfect husband. We pass the familiar, identical sign on sturdy posts fashioned from local black lava stone that marks the state boundary and evokes this spoken story. History in a hymn like the sound of wind singing through the spokes of steering. Wheel held with my hands today that will likely outlive this telling. Script scribbled in the margins of bibles, your father making his itemized lists on a Saturday before he took to the pulpit on Sunday. Today, cousins...

"Do you realize you're often having three conversations at one time" my friend tells me, laughing, as she aims to keep up. I think it's a bit like directing traffic, avoiding collision, one hand on the wheel and one in the air, gesticulating. My thoughts are generally on heightened alert. I live in a 5' 1" body in rooms built for people closer to six feet. I reach and dodge at the same time. It's just what the poet does. We come to the beach and climb out of the car. I still and quiet as if a lullaby has entered the equation. We walk the wet sand barely noticing the water as it overlaps and pulls back. We have been friends so long the conversation need not stop. Thirty years wide. We trudge and pause, build things together. My feet covered in the damp blue black sand. You wear your overcoat unbuttoned. I remember the profiles of faces of people you name, and we laugh at what we can and cannot recall. There is fog crossing over the bridge nearby, thrummi...

This is the table of tart and strong. A birthday breakfast made for myself this morning. I pry biscuits from a can whose sides split and pour hot water through biscochito coffee grounds from this state I know as home, sans sugar. A friend's gift comes unwrapped (yellow paper with florescent pink skeletons dancing in their flexible bones), and her universe joins my own at the evergreen cloth table top. A postcard of three Buddhas perched against a vase of stargazer lilies flash peace signs. Am I showing my age? I'm sure that I am. A day ahead with work calls and deadlines, in other words no day off for this responsible daughter. Even my father's card blows a sparkly horn proclaiming its heritage gifts of patience and efficiency. So, who am I to question others; all of us pushing, pressing, breaking and anticipating. Cranberry chutney on white bread. Coffee in a sturdy black mug. Heat shuffling through the rooms. I am a reliable companion in need of a haircut.  Tonigh...