CHOKECHERRY The whole of a life, a berry in my throat. a sugar cube dissolving in the tongue’s hollow. Some days I live with no past, and no name but mother—she is immortal, without biography. I was before her—as the full flower is before the seed that it bears to remake itself.
EASTER, 2020 Whatever holy day has woken, somebody first put water to boil, or laid the birch logs across a fire, someone tended to your life. When you reached for a cup, it was clean and waiting. Even those cold mornings it was your own body rising by habit toward a stale, familiar bread, late snow bending the lip of the lilies.
