Poems
82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984
It’s the night after Christmas
and I’m sitting out on the balcony
watching a huge full moon
and listening to the barking
of a half-dozen dogs
and calls of five different
frogs in the vegetable garden,
A dappled curve, fringed with
wattles to the left,
though the right-hand path, solid
rock, was the one.
A gang of cones hangs before me, long and cylindrical,
neither dark nor light – the colour of Milchkaffee.
One would overfill my palm. Last night the field
reinvented itself as one of those beds we lie down in
I stood in the hidden holding with my keys safe from judgement in my leaving he asked me to stand back it wasn’t worth explaining me to his ex my brother-in-law preyed on me relentlessly I held the baby in my arms it was happy in my arms healthy he said it was only once I looked at the baby called only once
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Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty
with sapphire eyes;
their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland
in a state of collapse.
Someone has left the day wide open here
But no one ever comes to mow the grass.
A man stands out of earshot, just a flash
At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.
Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant battering
and steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.
Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch
toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we’ll never occupy
again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass with you,
searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet winds cut
the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp, Quickly, I must go —
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
