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Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.

Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving

eastward, indiscriminate, original.

Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,

our nature disobediently tends toward nature.

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.

Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes

falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,

that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

To remain     ::        is to grieve
                        ::        is to answer
                        ::        what side of the río
                                  we crown
                        ::        or
                        ::        where your ancestors
                                  Coffin
 

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric.  Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.