Looking for Work
It’s making me a bit miserable,
looking for work on the computer.
She’s got coffee on
and the TV, too.
I say it’s too early for TV
and she goes, “I’m not in the mood,”
as if
we’ve gone through this before
and she has no intentions
on going back.

Wasps
My mom calls,
tells me the wasps have come back.
She can’t outrun a snail,
or so she tells me,
so she’s got me at her place to spray those wasps.

When far away, the wasps’ home resembles
a honeycomb, and they:
stalactites.

But they fall and stiffen,
after the spray.
Only their death can bring me close and I
can see the complex patterns
of their curled bodies – thin yellow lines between
brown.
I can only get this far with it.
Their home stays up in that corner of space
where the wall meets
The roof overhang. It’s a paper home and
I wonder if I can make paper from it, as
stupid a thought as that is. Paper I can write
that letter I’ve been meaning to write, say.

I sweep them up and toss them into the flower beds,
and come inside to my mother trying to light a cigarette
on the gas stove, her head tilted to the side,
her hair pushed back behind her ears.
She gets up and blows the smoke from her mouth
and I see
seventeen different colors in her hand.
The veins, blue, green, and purple.
The skin glistening and translucent.
She tells me something,
but I don’t remember what she says
after she says it.

Joints
It was some time during late winter
when the shadows of things cast blue.
The wall on the side of the house,
for one. Or her car in the driveway,
but no one was there to drive it. I looked
In the junk drawer for the spare keys, but they
weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere, not
in some place I could find, at least. You see,
her car was parked directly behind mine,
and I didn’t have the space to leave. I even
considered calling a tow truck, but that
would’ve been far too dramatic. And I tried,
I tried to move my car in any way I could, turning
the wheel this way and that, in little movements
that were only faint suggestions, and in
big sweeping gestures, too. But there
Was the wall and the pole
and I
couldn’t move my car from underneath
The carport.

I have questions
but no one to answer.
I look at my hands outside.
in the creases between my knuckles,
there too is that shadow, of that
same color as the shadow of her car
when it was blocking
my car in the driveway,
that one time.