Fatti maschii parole femine

1

In other words, speak softly or carry a big [unmentionable].

Is that it? And this from the colony given to Catholics,

a place, Sister Ann said, “we would have been safe.”

In the sixth grade, your City of God, something grander

coaxed from your shrewd hand: girls filling their palms

like the deadly spoons of catapults with chalk erasers

to be smashed clean. Boys assigned Dickinson for interrupting

any female voice. My throat rasping with the spume of

pastel dust, my journal awaiting the day I’d dress

your age: nubbed sweater. Silky tihts. [Sic], lovesick.

2

Bernardine Franciscans wear brown or beige—the colors, they think,

of poverty. White or black detail not proscribed where it does not distract.

Then you: suits of fawn, peahen, morel. Cola coats, beech-bark hose.

Coco Chanel on safari. As for why God brought you sisters

instead of a man—Speech is for need and for good, you say.

3

When God scared us too much, we made him a bad joke. To “host” someone

was to put him in one’s mouth. “Lent” meant a partner

borrowed for the night. Transferred to a desk in a childless town,

you filed insurance for sisters’ matchstick legs, applied

for their used eyeglasses, for the garish orange bus passes

the halt and wounded use for free. I see you in an unburnt pyre

of stamps and carbon paper, their lightless tongues

wrapping your fine lone wrists. All I know of you thereafter

is inference: in cedar stench of steam-trunk coats, in angular

luxe of doe stepping across compost—O woman of Jerusalem!—

in quart of milk sour on its cold grate but furious, gorgeous white.