I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days...

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days. My hair is a long knot behind my back. There is a red blemish on my left cheek. It looks distinguished there so I leave it. I rearrange the photos of my mother atop my grandmother's old piano, the photos of her as a child, a teenager. Here she stands between her two brothers, her hair red and huge about her. Here she is dressed as a child in a catholic school uniform, my mother, she wears a tie. At home she is wearing eyeglasses, thick black pointed rims. I've heard her recall them so many times. In the photography rooms she can see without them, she can smile half-way. Then beside and in front of her, I've placed a new favorite. I call her the nun. She is a nun. I never knew this woman, this nun of my family. I thank her, I love her for that. She was not a cheerful woman, said my mother. But she is such a wonderful photo, sitting on the right in a white and wooden chair, the most joyfully spectacled woman beside her. Another woman I do not know sits beside her. She is holding a baby in her lap. She is wearing a pink or a faded red dress and sitting with this nun on someone's lawn. A tree fills the whole frame behind her. She is so lovely in her pink, with her baby and her nun. And I don't give a damn who she is.

there's this picture

there's this picture of you and me i keep seeing
somehow
it makes me think that you are a happy person
who is secretly sad and that i am a sad person
who is secretly happy.

what is the worst way to hang,
roland? roland outside the bar is thinking of his father.

i hold his hand. i stroke his face. i would carry him
but he is too tall and i am not enough.
i need the help lifting my own body

over the wall to get into the bar where no one drinks,
the kitchen where no one has been cooking the appetizers
for years. there are two rooms full of metal chairs. the shadows
of chairs stacked one on the other dance with the flicker
of a bic lighter. i burn my thumb, say shit, and then burn it again.

you want to hold my hand, don't you and we can't see our faces in the dark.
yes, it was special. yes, i was happy. we sat in a sad crawl space
we had to dangle over a 12 foot drop to get into. a homeless man, a person
lives here. we sat in a sad crawl space together and i was so very happy.
we thought about breaking a window but didn't.