Kelley White


First Accident

Pulled into the drive at St. Gregory the Illuminator,
my daughter, at seventeen, competent on the cell phone,
insurance, tow trucks, her dad; her boyfriend is walking befuddled in the field
with bits of tire and loops of steel around his arms. I can’t see
the damage to their car. It is shiny new, just one corner lopped off.
What he is finding is ancient history, other people’s forgotten losses. Trash.
I hug my youngest girl, their passenger, gone shaking pale in the brilliant spring sun.


Stifling

Will they restore the slave cabins
at Independence Mall? The Liberty
Bell sits silenced in its glass cage
and remembers them squalled out
muck and charred sticks and sucked
bone where we pretended there were gardens
and no voice crying but the wind.


Grace is

unconscious mathematics
of the highest order
I was cutting the grass

you see the connection


His gentlemanly pleasures

Lil said Uncle Zias
always took his
Saturdays after his bath;
you sir, have been known
to bathe, but you certainly
are no gentleman.