School My Father Learns to Pass for Dutch
My Father Flying Home From War, 1975
Genealogy
Games
Lent
3 Our Wilderness Period
Before and After, Botched
Still Life with Mannequin and Leg of Lamb
Fire Plan
Frontier Thesis
Rabbit Starvation
Inventing the Body
4 Bad Magic
We Won’t Make it to the Talkies
Vigil
Friendly Letter
Horses Dream of Horses
All Good Girls Deserve
Fervent Missive
Revisionist Love Story
Birds Keep Nothing in Their Bones
Unsent Defense
Cutting Nature at the Joint
Come Fetch
The Secret Nancy
• Acknowledgements
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1
Ex Machina
The chorus girls descend, their wings a wonder
of feather and zipline. The oboes
in the orchestra pit yawn
as if to gulp them whole, but the girls
are singing and so swallow down
their fear. The villain shows himself
too soon and is all wrong for this play—
not a dashing captain but a pirate
with a stick shift for an arm and a stopwatch
in his heart. Where the audience
should be—the rows of lovely velvet seats
and numbered placards, donated
by the dead or named for them—there’s
only sea. The violinists do a kick turn
and set out into the waves. What happened
to the playwright, to the plot? Who will stitch
the chorus to the theme? Who will,
when the curtain drops, unhook the beauties
from their wings and turn them back
to girls, wrap terrycloth robes around
their sequined bodysuits? We cannot wait
for angels. We’ll be our own gods now.
Watch us swinging from the rafters
like a lifeboat or a bird of prey.
Divine and Mechanical Bodies
The year my sister turned into a crow
I ran the cinder track around the football field for hours. I stayed on
after practice ended, after coach packed up
his whistle and his stopwatch, after the other girls changed back
into sweats and carpooled home. At my house
my sister gathered all the shiny things. She plucked the buttons
from our parkas and strung them from the bedposts,
lined the closet doors with tinfoil and propped the silver-plated serving trays
along the dressers so that everywhere she looked
she’d see her own eyes looking back. She wouldn’t speak.
When our mother called us down to dinner
she
