Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipat…

Alone with time, he waits for his… a boy growing old at the dining ro… pressing into the pages of one of… the flowers he picked all morning in his mother’s garden, magnolia,…

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.

Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,

That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…

We two sit on our bed, you between my legs, your back to me,… slightly bowed, that I may brush a… your hair. My father did this for my mother,

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s… The garden is bare now. The grou… brown and old. What is left of th… in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.

In the dark, a child might ask, W… just to hear his sister promise, An unfinished wing of hea… just to hear his brother say, A house inside a house,

I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son… My little root who won’t drink mil… Little pale foot sunk in unheard-o… Little clock spring newly wet

That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a… its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It’s up to no good,

She begins, and my grandmother joi… Mother and daughter sing like youn… If my father were alive, he would… his accordion and sway like a boat… I’ve never been in Peking, or the…

Here, as in childhood, Brother, n… And someone has died, and someone… born, while our father walks throu… and sets all the clocks for spring… weighs heavy on my forehead, his d…

When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voi… Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to th…

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,