Insert girl.
Insert wet.
Insert family hurt axe hand.
Insert locks.
Make a box—kindness, hunger, etcetera.
Insert pear tree, juice dripping over the chin.
(Increase hunger. Increase doors.)

Insert tooth insert tooth insert tooth
She is lonely, and covered with blood.
Her flesh her body taut with thirties.
She is older.
Increase wealth. Increase grief.
I am not trying to build sympathy
but empty beds terrify me,
a thing howling and encrusted
outside the window. House like a coffin.
Decrease distance.

The summer heating like a firing chamber—
tender appearing in spurts as evaporated milk.
Questions appear:
Do you know the throng of cut, of bird?
Do you know this weight toward becoming?
What to do with all this unfurling—

Insert box, insert hand, insert blood box

This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

A year past our twenty-fifth anniversary, Andrew’s face settles into a finer granite, boney as the roast I am cooking him for our occasion.

I wait until Emma and Lizzie are out of the house before I serve the food—

someone burgled us of late, and I give no kindness to his children, make them a bed of indifference,

because that was what Andrew showed me in the aftermath. How
to lay a hand with heaviness, keep secrets

in the back of the kitchen where no one looks. Te sutures, coffin nails, buried fishing weights that
hold a family together.

I am so tired. Andrew smacking his lips constantly, eyes roving through the house.

Even before the robbery, I sleep like an ex-lover, wake up panicked and afraid.

I reheat the food. I avoid the daughters when they call.

This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

And they do keep me in their meanness
And I am not safe
And this summer so hot—
I am molting everyone is.
Do you see the sheets crisping in the wind
Do you see the feathers, falling still from
every single tree
Yes I saw the bodies
Who didnt

This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Then I must sleep in a sheet twisted
tight with blood, stomach heavy through the night. Then I know the scream of the ferry. Then “family” a word that stirs and stirs.
What use are doors in this weather? Of course

we hear everything—Father’s moans ghost
through walls like cheesecloth. Here is a day.
Here is another.
There’s nothing to do but eat,
piling one plate then the next, pears
plummeting from the backyard brown as
blood. Father never
talks anymore, and Mrs. Borden
changes in my sleep to someone

who is still alive. We always lock our
rooms. My nightgown the finest terry cloth
or linen. Look at my face, my flushed cheek,
my lips. Look at my tenderness.

If I told you it was an intruder who did it,
would you take my hand in yours
and touch my trembling back?

It was. It was. Oh God, it was.

This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

We wear black veils to the funeral
and the cofns hold light like a basket.

It is August. Our clothes swelter.
Te trees that line their plot are unsavory.

I do not cry and do not sleep.
Beneath the clothes, my body is falling
apart, becoming illuminated

with fame,

and they are not here:

I do not grieve
I do not grieve

This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .