Author: Stephanie McManus

When I remember
              slips

and pauses, down
often.

What, love?
Ghosts?

Palms to face, hold
the baby bird  |  my heart
one old           one new my

father’s smile and
the waves   |    laughter
I hold pure and threatening.

A heart is full, 
dark cry knifed in
the throat crawling,

the bark of trees
I cannot stop putting 
a palm upon, there 

a suspicion of beauty 
is kept. A person can 
become     inevitable-

fresh snow, long arms 
I hold them around the powder cold.

Daisies hold no memory, but there
above the creek alligators and otter
lay still in the Florida heat

on my stomach chaining weeds
like those in meadows far away
but small and fragile

in warm lungs was a god, in
paper, melodies and beats
a concrete sun, the

memory of heat/ I made a crown
call it confidence strung stem within split
stem, and soft petals holding on, un-

rooted quiet.  My quiet heart
sitting where no one would go
on the sign for a school twenty

deep mobile homes stacked in
repetition that dulls the senses.

But these children take
the long way home, empty
parks to play cops and robbers

or some hide in the safety
between rows at the library
absorbing what it means to

thrive and become like heroes

              or villains.

I see a wild kitten in the leaves
outside my window/ she leaps
and chases something she knows

to chase, and my cache of flowers
too wild and delicate to be
real daises- I chain a

crown, unroot the silence
without a sound but the song
becoming between breath

and thought.

Riding a manta ray
through mangroves, small
hands small feet like
a squirrel suddenly grounded

is ready/ I have

curls from my grandmother
that cannot be kept when I am
hot and salty between waves-

a girl I remember from before
taken by a fish of peculiar shape
(I lived by the sea then) and how

I fled and how I bent hand-over-hand
around every curve by habit.

It is in my roots to see a hole and place
mouth over space and hold until
it is filled; a starving a needing

an ancestral grieving in my heart
where if there is a falling there is a

turn: my father told me
philosophy and religion
can be the same in men

it starts in a daydream/
I know in our hearts are
our own heroes.

The Halifax river burns sometimes, a brackish lagoon where dolphins pass through, I have thought they were angels when young. the bell

rings      to lift the bridge over
there/my grandfather bracketed by the red blinking lights and
crickets in his open palm but quieter. just a certain haunting in us in

my mother’s crossed legs and crossed arms when she does not see i watch. I feel the rope, I

feel the ropes of a hammock and will just stay there,
and they are real and hurt a little. watch grasshoppers and think of chasing them though the grass itches, think of chasing grasshoppers earlier that day through the itchy grass to feel their little feet tap on my palm like a song. to feel a happiness/

I think of geppeto, because that’s just the way of it. I think of arms and legs on strings though I am running. at night

the sound of the bell, my mother’s gray eyes as the waters still at night. the stars are all blind but shrewd as an owl who lives in the elm with his sad questions, I see

her tender heart she has delicately fed, like a rose we once knew, who a prince loved like no other who a daughter tried to make well.  and,
like a glass dome upon the thorny spine I stay even now when she has gone.

We keep our mouths
gardens under glass
like a seed without rain
or a heart smooth and white
is without any pain

in silence-

I rather
my wild edges
rather hold fire, stand
where the world ends
in a sudden fall-
so your hand is
everything, and not
more of the same

distraction/ and you
speak to me of
a temple of
a place we can pray
to each other on
knees somewhere
warm where nothing

burns but the quiet
behind your eyes when sad
with me, but truth is

loud like you and I
like love is loud and

trying to hold all
men equally-
the gravity of it
is weightless
like ice beneath

will give way
and we fall hard/
and terribly:
I leave my socked foot
under the blankets and
say, to hell with all of it
except for you.