Poetry

Your grave hooded by goose bumped leaves; the chill of late autumn’s breeze has them dry, copper colored, spotted sickly yellow; they sneeze.

Baba’s faults were pouched in me, so red and erratic that they had blown the power in the northeastern half of the country. From our stoop, we feel the night sponging up the heat wave. The concrete steps practice prose on my thighs.

I think all you wanted by then was to feel the tuft of a paintbrush along your fingers. The cold, pressed hospital sheets blotted your sweat. You seeped air from a slack upper lip. Mrs. Honig, there was nothing wrong with dusk—yawning open like Georgia’s last blossom, swallowing you with wet acrylic on your heels.