All you need to know about me 
is I’ve broken three chairs in my life 
just by laughing in them. As in, 
splatted flat into sticks. Two more 
than could be considered mere chance. 
This amounts to portent, nay destiny. 
I am here to break chairs with my big laugh. 
Here to mar nice furniture in the name of play. 
I am here to keep guffawing even from the floor, 
having just busted my ass. I am here to milk the bit 
till everyone gasps and clutches their abs, too. 
All you need to know is once a friend 
read me so ruthlessly, startlingly true
that a bobby pin popped clean out 
of my ‘do and clinked on the floor, bright
and musical as the start of a giggle.

Each day I wake and run my tongue over my teeth
to check I haven’t ground them down all night to dust. 
So far it hasn’t happened yet, although I often dream
it has. In truth, my jaw stays clenched for hours
and their surfaces feel rougher than they did the day
before. Again this morning, I stretched and rose,

opened the blinds to the horizon’s apricot and rose,
and washed and lotioned my face and brushed my teeth
and verified their bite remains intact another day.
The tooth dream so real, it calls to mind my father’s dust
in its jar on the bookcase: how many thousands of hours
since he left. A thought, by contrast, preposterous as a dream.

In those last years, we talked sometimes about his life’s dream
and mine. From when I was a little girl, each day he rose
while the world was still dark, sat working at his desk hours
before the other staff arrived. I loved to make him smile with teeth
because he so seldom did, loved to breathe the sawdust
scent when he’d strike down a tree and chop it into stacks. Today

the last wood he ever piled into a heap sits by the drive, the day
he cut it forever fixed in time: decaying cord of logs. Futile dream
of one more fire where he’d throw on another one, bright dust
of sparks cascading up into the sky, while a moon rose
over Sugar Loaf. I consider the saw, think of how its teeth
can lay bare the heart of the tree, reveal its million hours

now at their close, in circles marking time. A dentist spent three hours
inside my rotten molar while I lay in his chair one summer day, 
winding the ruined root slowly, bit by bit, from out of one of my teeth.
The flow of nitrous through the mask held me inside a dream.
And later, there were no nerves left in that tooth when I rose
and reemerged into the drought-grayed trees and dust

of afternoon. The marquee reads WE MAKE OUR OWN SAWDUST
outside the salvage lumber place. Just that. No hours
or any other words. We really do, I muse. I pluck a wild rose
later from the verge of the woods out back, but within a day
it fades and droops, itself as clinging yet inconstant as a dream—
the bite of it still there, yes, in its stem full of keen teeth

though those too will in their turn succumb to dust. Another day 
is done. So many end with this or that unsettling dream.
Tomorrow, one day older, I’ll approach the mirror, smile, inspect my teeth.

the aggrieved, the indefinite
the box of papers, the saved voicemail
the box of ashes, fine as flour

the light, the dark, the gray
the waiting for what
for what comes next, whatever that is

the leavetaking when no one was looking
the lost one gone mid-thought
a sentence that will never be finished

I was thinking of the soul,
that lone sock lost in the wash
which my more pragmatic part
insists must exist someplace
waiting to be found

I was thinking of the sock,
of how it might disintegrate
slowly or all at once, a mist
of lint still clinging
to the screen
and how easily one might mis-
recognize this, its new form

I was thinking of what
matter is, and of what matters,
world without end,
no thing ever created
nor destroyed, only
transmuted, both soul
and mateless sock, into the next
unutterable thing

I never fight with anyone but me.
The rifts that roil this cell I wrought with my own hands.
Though another inmate’s face is what I see,
I never fight with anyone but me.
Any quarrel had with others is a plea
From the warden in me too, who understands
I never fight with anyone but me:
The rifts that roil this cell I wrought with my own hands.

It cups the custard, cradles the noodle.
I use it even when I don’t have to,
scoop under, then lift too too big a bite
to the need of my open mouth
which too for a moment becomes a spoon:
my tongue a curved wet shaving of want,
vehicle delivering a soupçon of what’s good
to all my yearning middle. Too,
some nights in a square of moonlight you
and I lie gleaming on our sides in bed
like silver in a drawer: discrete and neck to
neck, handle to handle, bowl to tiny bowl
brim full of just that bit which we can hold

The sky is scored with home-going, scarred hard
by chemtrails, as blue as leave-taking feels. A sky
full of daughters fleeing fathers of all kinds:
the one who wasn’t there, the one who got too close,

the one whose demons masked his face for so long
the mask adhered. A sky full, too, of fathers: staring
into space, reading the next line of fine print, working,
returning finally after half a lifetime. I come home

to find my father’s brain writhing with mice, its knot
of odd cells hungry, proliferent. They only want
to live and make more like themselves, so
how can I blame them, yet I do. My father’s brain

streaked with chemicals, with the exhaust
of sixty years. My father’s brain a nest of vermin
curled inside a warm wall, a mess of silent
vipers, a mist of life and loss. My father once said

his job was finding money, and now I know the cost.
A house that empties though it’s full.
A capsule hurtling towards the earth.

one way perhaps to
know the person you say you
love is to see them

asleep: gone far off,
alone, their face serious
and ungenerous

but soft, directed
down at whatever consumes
their nighttime mind

whatever makes them
grimace, contort, gasp, shiver
it is not you

My mother asks me to pray
for her and my dad, and I try,
but the words won’t start. The day
is grim, the clouds a slumped pile,
only my wit’s dim flare shows
I’m, thank God, not yet dead.
But soon he will be, and snow
will come and stay in dingy heaps.
Each night the moon will grow
then wane, then begin again. It keeps
its circuit, as I nurse my dread.
Dear Lord, forgive my concavity.
Father, I submit to gravity.
Oh Lord, as above, so below.

twelve moons gone
and then another
through my fingers
into the river

reflections shiver
on top of the water
the face of my father
the face of my mother

I see them whenever
the fall turns to winter
when I recall

the wind of November
that winnows relentlessly
all that is tender