As Mourning Doves Persist

Grandmothers’ recipes. Memories of grandfathers who gardened. Our daughter’s baby book which I always promised I’d retrieve first in case of fire or earthquake. I’d like to say I would remember to bundle the two-inch thumb drives that contain  everything we’ve written in recent years, but maybe it would be better to make it out with only our fresh imaginations in tact.   Pack all the photographs instead. That beloved baby book so full that it is tied and retied with mended bands. I will insert between the pages, one love letter each from the forgiven and sensuous men, and the reliable women too.  Exercises in cursive pen and epistles of regret. I will bundle up the scent of purple wisteria encroaching on the second floor window of a former San Francisco Sunset kitchen.  The first hour in which my husband walked into the bookstore where I was working. His blue eyes and his wounded silence questioning everything.  My  mother and my fa...

Inside I imagine puckered cups of butter cookies, paper that releases a sigh. But instead there may be fiction, wishes never reciprocated. Playbill of redundant arguments. One black glove, unlost, fraying. What vestibule on an emptied table, solo temptation labeled with another’s name. Guarded. Eventually recycled. Initials carved in melting snow. A tool unsuited to the task of prying open. Without valentine.

There is a certain stretch of highway where my brother was thrown.          Skidded on skin. His broken neck mended                    with chrome halo and screws. Farther north, a second brother did succumb. Falling to curve          at the fence line. Scent of whiskey in his speed.                    What he finally could not forgive, having changed his first name to Blue. His last to Freedom. Leaving behind          two daughters to mourn and an ex-wife who claimed him                    as the love of her life. Third brother hangs an army jacket on a simple cross    ...

Women slap midday pavement in their sandals, dressed in swimsuits in an assortment of sizes at the hot spring. Two eleven-year olds sport zero curves, run soupy mud onto their tiny thighs. I dive for a hammock with a hat slung low on my forehead from under which I can still spy the ample hourglasses of souls, and I speculate what they do in other days. One with a face flat and broad, skillet of knowledge, I imagine flown in from an ancient island. Here she absent-mindedly rubs her partner’s neck just at the hairline. My mother dog paddles in an iron-infused pool out of reach. Her white hair accentuates her blue eyes and suit. She looks over toward me and sighs. Submerges up to her shoulders. Two new arrivals are painted. One butterfly tattoo etched across a chest with wings that seem to flutter above a line of stretchy lycra. One thousand eyes in this damp span of moth wings wet with mountain runoff. Another’s thigh wrapped with ink garter. ...