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                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.

Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not

in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid

atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop

damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball

in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,

not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,

an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like

the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark

so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous

wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my

wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...

For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.

I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.

My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.

Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.

She love rainin on parades.

HOME IS WHERE

I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow. 
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.

The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.