“Everyone,” your mother-in-law, scolds you
“knows you shouldn’t use scissors
when pregnant. Do you want your baby
to have a cleft lip?”

You apologize for being a thoughtless
daughter-in-law. All scissors
will be removed.

You don’t tell her how yesterday you sheared
the hedges

By June the season will be gone
if we don’t write it this minute
we will never write it

even here hiding in the forest of your absence
I ask for no more than blank paper

Trees lean in to venture that I may wish
for a flutter of letters, or a scoop of arms
but I ask for

I do not know,
only that the panther
stalking me from the mountains
is here in all his darkness.

My path jagged with rocks
is fire under my feet.

There is no shelter,
only vines for my throat,
branches for my face,
thorns for my skin.

I do not know how I arrived,

Spring comes in March in triplicate hues,
Pink purple lilac, the color of gray
Women’s scarves, variable shades of magnolia
Afloat on branches or petals loose
On grass. I tie up my sneakers—over
Sixty, out for my morning walk, a Dorothy
To eye more months. In June and July
The

Martin Alexander

In Grandma’s house when we arrived on leave
the grand piano yawned and woke from two years’ sleep
and bared its gleaming teeth – black-gapped and white –
sprawled out, a friendly beast across the sunny parlour floor.

There was a box of sandstone bricks
for