DiaBLOGue

my decision 
to escape my own sure shivaree 
came to me 
as we herded two of my 

                Reading is one thing—and metaphors 
                imitate life in literature only. 
Yet when birds flapped a curtain of chatter over a sky-scrap

Leaves of a different cut, 
perceiving other winds, 
the children blow in spring 
and laugh aloud like children. 

for RHC 

Now I lay me down by the freeway, 
In a duplex in Cedar City, Utah;

aged ten, 
walked, starved, froze 
with the Martin Company 
and left her parents in shallow graves 
near the Sweet water. 

When the iron works was shutting down 
and you couldn’t buy a sack of flour 
in Cedar Valley at any price 
(grasshoppers we had—but no gulls), 
the Lord sent mushrooms. 

The heat and dead 
Branches snagging 
My hair and the apricots 
Hung ripe, unpicked,