Poetry

I invited the apostle to my stir-fry dinner by accident. I shook into my smoking wok a packet of dried

wood ear mushrooms—the ones I’d bought from a farmers’ market. I threw in a handful of broccoli, carrots, snap peas, halved Brussels. My husband

Name of the donation agency, which made me the goose: twenty-two and waiting

tables at Bacchus on Meadow in grad school. I had to inject myself with hormones each day

for a month to prod my ovaries. Three grand a batch, I’d told my boyfriend, dropping the egg

I, too, Hans Christian, once left a warning note. Your bedside

table’s scribble read, I only appear to be dead—an effort to ward off

the would-be pallbearers who’d drop you

Luke, I’ve been thinking of your green
burial lately, the taupe shapes your afterlife
must take as it grows in soft lobes
up sassafras, black walnut, and beech trees

in Vanleer, Tennessee. Your family
kept your gravesite’s location private,
so some punk won’t pilgrimage there, hoping
to pluck the clusters of shiitake or white button

I would’ve stabbed the man’s hand
had he not jerked it away—this is what I usually say
toward the end of the story. The man

had pried back the right vinyl side panel

That petal pink three-seater from the Baptist
thrift shop on Broad Street? Its ribbed texture

had the channeled dust, striped the upholstery’s
piping grey. You took eight months to tell me

your used couch came with a warning tag: that the sofa
had sat for decades in the waiting room of a Richmond

Turns out my body’s a dollar sweet potato
her register’s screen said, as she lifted

her scanner, and I laughed. I can finally call myself
Garnet, Georgia Jet, Carolina Red. Those names . . .

Someone arrest me here in this city park where an ivory

heat combs itself in slow strokes from the swamp . . .

Clover and oats, a tangle of bile-
singed timothy hay—what Sonny

said we’d feel. Gloves
kissed to our elbows. Ferment of the winter

cow field . . .

We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery

disk caught the lamplight before
she slipped from her yacht

to drown in the waves off this island . . .

As heat moves through like its own animal
whose evening pulse is headlights and the reply

of lit cats’ eyes. As the amber of Freon
streaked my ceiling and the ceiling

begins to cave, I’ve had
no AC for days. I’ve had knuckles

unfold from the oleanders, try to lock
with mine . . .

you’ll have shaky hands all your life. I thought
caffeine, a strained tendon from typing
with my wrists

curved back. I thought bad
nerves . . .

I told the serial killer he could feed his Venus flytrap Spam             the summer I worked the outdoor lawn

and garden center. I’d known to say this since fifteen, with my mother telling me             all men who ask young girls directions from their white vans are murderers . . .

My ex-lover received it at seventeen skiing the steep slope at Wintergreen called

Devil’s Elbow. The early snowmelt along the Blue Ridge had slipped the white limb of a birch

You moved clippings of your childhood spider plant
with us in a Ziploc half-filled with tap water

so we could grow something once rooted in the cool
valleys of Blacksburg in our new

Houston duplex . . .