A. Wright

Addresses

I.

No one's sure whether
the cigarette butts in my mother's
rose garden are mine or hers,

or how the petals swallow
each instant of edible light

these mornings leave waste
in this yard

where we've rubbed shoulders
with both the living
and their dead.

There is a sun that blooms toward me
from the void of sleep in her pupil,
hurrying me to take the scents
of each her gentle suicides
rising between breezes
and let them kiss my chest,
thick as
smoke.

II.

I'd swear the numbers on this house
count the childhoods I spent out back
in the yard,

memorizing the kind of silences
that makes August happen,

tracing old footprints around
in the shade of

another long sun
receding into a living
room painting.






III.

The garden in my belly:

I let my carnations
combust into small
diamond epiphanies
(spontaneous transfusions
of blood & sunlight)
and cough them into the sky
where they will remain
until the sun explodes
to make me whole.

An oak sighs
into her own dust, inhales
the ultraviolet of clouds
passing overhead into her
future.