There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

-Ecclesiastes 1:11

you can hear wood breaking you’ve gotten close

in the riverbed with the crowd stacked in and the pallets burning

with a slice of rebar someone flogs a beat onto a paint can

The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer

—Walt Whitman

After a day of walking through sun-clutched Virginia, you unlatch

your wool coat and hang it from the ladder. The sleeves of your

blue Oxford rolled back from your wrists.

The well-heeled couple strolling arm and arm discussing the upcoming presidential race had already agreed that General Zachary Taylor would be elected the new president. All the newspapers were extolling the general’s triumphant exploits during the Mexican War, resulting in the annexation of a great swath of land connecting the territory of Texas with distant California.

And in the kitchen your whatnot drawer,

graveyard for clever contraptions

that never changed your life

quite the way you’d hoped—the potato

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it,

and it is grace itself which makes this void.

—Simone Weil

Cold makes a candelabra of my lungs

at the opened window, blue on blue

behind an unfurnished attic of trees—

fretwork, winter’s glittering liens,

Lord, I see you in a wetsuit. A name tattooed on your thigh.

I don’t know how far I can go in admiring you, in uncovering

your blessed self. I don’t know how persistently I can present my case.

All classes have some little lamb / Who loves to go to school

-written on a notecard found in the 1897 scrapbook of Katharine Shearer, Mt. Holyoke student

Four chords of Earth Wind and Fire’s “You Can’t Hide Love” climbed out of the Canal Street station and into a flat blue sky, blue like if blue were a shade of gray, dusty teal on an endless wall. Skirted and suited behinds switched in Percy Clondon’s face, briefcases swung against his arms and knees, jostling the Walkman in his pocket as he jogged up the stairs.

My brother’s snake was named Percy. Percy was a boa constrictor and Percy was eight feet long and Percy could kill a grown man in four minutes. And I was not a man, I was just a boy, so think how fast Percy could kill me.

Her summer dress was a hillside in bloom.

Pastel print of gladiolas and allium bathed

in a ginkgo leaf’s green, ruffled around

the bodice, an afternoon held by its white seams

My world of boys revolved around spit,

the palmed bet-glue, brawl beginner—

insult’s first cousin. The farthest loogie ruled

the club. So when he spit on my back once

I saw a dream

which made me afraid,

and the thoughts upon my bed

and the visions of my head

troubled me

(Daniel 4:5)

There’s a patch of plastic trapped

inside the Pacific’s

Northern Gyre where inward

spirals of weather stabilize

water, ensnare its mass

The river will protect you from her

only so much. How can it, perched

as you are on a forehead

the size of a coffee table? As if washing a house

Forgive me, for forgiving her,

your birth mother. I am unforgiving

unless for selfish reasons, and it seems my reasons

are as selfish as they come. I am trying

8:00 a.m.

After breakfast, I sit on the living-room floor and play with my Lincoln Logs, thinking about the fairy tales my mother reads to me and how so many of them begin with a step back in time—there was a poor woodcutter and his wife and his two children; a sweet little maid, much beloved by everybody; a man and his wife who had long wished for a child, but in vain.

Three months before my divorce was finalized, we hit the sales doldrums of January and the department store laid off a quarter of its employees. After seven years in customer service I had some seniority, but was given two months’ pay and a promise that I’d get called back when I was needed.

Nkiru entered with the flowers. She set them down on the kitchen counter. They were young roses, petals on the verge of blooming, but suddenly it seemed to her that they smelled rank, like old stems in stale water.