three.

A student said to me yesterday, "you must really hate English,"
and he meant it, took my insults and wandering history for dislike.
I stopped, thrown from my tangent, started again. Tried to
put into words the way that love can look, sometimes, a little,
like rejection. Think of starting with a story. Once upon a time,

my ancestors crossed an ocean. They chose a land under green-black
water, and they called it home. They gave it hearts, children,
much that they cherished and all that they dreamed. It gave back rain.
It gave winters that bit and clawed, summers that cracked the clay
and swallowed the seed corn. It gave and gave, and they

learned not to ask. My grandmother taught me to force my hands
to make something beautiful, and this was how she spelled love.
Words were too glaring, gave notice, and to keep people from taking
too loudly, we offered no more than grudging affections. The way
my father always asked where I'd been timewasting, in place of the

words for worry and hope. The things we love, we treat like the
dirt under our feet, the grit we adore and fear in equal measure.
Start again. I don't hate the language. I love its sharp edges, the
complexities that drive me mad, the places where other languages
lap over and slide between and space themselves out on my tongue.

This is why I call it names, point out its flaws, teach children to
imagine it as a tool they can own. This is language as birthright,
as the home we fall into and shape and release again, changed. If
I weren't in love, I wouldn't need to complain. That's what love is,
the places we accept, cracks and shouts and stitches, all.

two.

There aren’t easy words for
the place I called home, no
simple definitions to describe
how the scrape of wax makes
me shiver and the sound of the
cars on the highway calls to
me of Lent, the light, breaking
through a window, of tombs.

one.

In the crooked corners
of a house I no longer own
are bits of our lives left behind.
A pair of shoes, toes-tilted,
from a recital we didn't attend.
Books, pages uneven like promises,
still stacked along the wall
where the water came in.
We tried to peel them apart
but in the end it couldn't be done,
the stories had become each other.
Ivy wilding down the
sides of my grandmother's funeral
plant. That candle, the one
you never loved, the one forgotten until
we couldn't decide
where it came from,
who it should follow.