13.2 – Blood Orange Review

The Night Before My Father Buries His Father

I wanted my handfuls / to rain down as far as his.

Throw it on the fire, dear one.

i have said my piece unbeknownst to me

I stumbled down roads // linked arm-in-arm with / friendless, pining men

I remember playing // with loose beads of mercury.

i feed / my love // the soil’s boiled blood

I say the ghosts have gone // quiet, bleached blue.

Baldonado won the mayoral election of 1968 in a landslide of 521,101 votes to 46,799 votes.

Let us call him Denby.

I was never one for the trappings of shipwrecks.

I thought I’d never see him again, not after he’d left Boston and moved back to London.

The one incentive I had for tracking down an apartment any sooner was so my son and daughter could finally see me in a home of my own.

When the Lord God saw that the man and the woman had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, he made garments of skins for them and clothed them.

When I am eight years old, the beast arrives in a box from overseas.

Bodies are fragile.