Sometimes the thing that may destroy
your home sings. I love that song too.

Room for uncertainty.

Make room in yourself for the longest sentence
you have yet to say. That was my only singing lesson.

For safety, I abandoned any clothes preoccupied with language, even
a dry rotted rice sack

with the word sweet. Even hair clips inscribed
with clarity: don’t and touch.

Today, I looked for the smallest iteration of myself.

I am thinking of ordering plums from California
because at this moment they are on the tree

and at 11 a.m. they will not. I am in love
with this kind of transparency.  

Room for uncertainty.

A friend reads fortunes in my hair when my lover won’t, love
refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.

And still, someone enters to ask if I wasn’t born lucky.
I keep a whole rabbit to help me survive. Oh, it eats

and eats at what I was born with. Beloved, if I titled this poem
My Mother’s America, would it contain her mother? How long

before you know the urgency of this sentence is lost?

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Note: “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach Us Pleasure” first appeared in print in Copper Nickel