What The Music Said

I call this one stirring the risotto, this one tapping the pencil when nervous which is different from tapping the pencil when focused. Here where we run my mother’s pearl necklace across the surface of the drum it sounds as if I might be dragging a large chain, next I try it with an actual chain. These shells pulled from a faraway ocean somehow sound like rain. Or the shaking of a cereal box. This is the soundtrack of the movie I want my life to be—everything in concert with everything else and building to something larger and grand even as it’s impossible to know what. Here where I play the drums with a handheld straw broom, it’s possible I swiped it from my wife, my husband, from our kitchen, from the pantry where we keep the canned peaches. Everything marches forward one beat at a time. One step one foot in front of another. Blow into this hollow tube, see what kind of sound it makes. See? I can feel the arch in your eyebrow. And so it goes, even when you’re playing on a plastic bag, or fluting your half empty beer, this is the conversation we hold between our rivers.

Baby Boy Blastocyst

For Elijah

Presently you’re
not much more than
a clot or clump

a small gathering around
a hollow center
holding court

and every so
often dividing a new
cell’s elbow to rub against

and thus the circle
grows—abuzz
as at an impossibly good party

with no pretense
everyone’s nucleus
beautiful and equally exposed

at the collar bone
of your mother’s
mitochondrial necklace