Go Empty Your Pockets

Okay       I will go empty 
my pockets—only let me
keep the ink jar of vert green
the morning glory seed
and the switch        let me keep the fat
pink marker and the insurance
policy on which I’ve written pinkly Fuck
encomiasts of sin              And let me keep
my best friend stealing cheapo baby
clothes from the strip mall totally
waxed with seasons of rain       I’ll hang on
to the blue crystal and the gold
locket that snaps a photo where I sit
in my mother’s lap shaded by her sun
hat looking like a happy child      And
keep the vision of myself 

as a melancholy child         I was standing
at the door with my backpack seeing 
the yard as dirt with weather over it
and have never seen anything more       Back 
then I rubbed buttercups on my chin 
because someone told me that’s 
what kids do      I don’t do
     that anymore but let me keep
the teeth I saved and a photograph 
            of the moon like Oh
      here we go like what like
    the barrel of a gun with
a lightbulb in it that’s the best
I can do        like Frank Stanford going on and on
about the moon like my grandmother’s
big bulbous toe like a dictionary shaped
like the moon like a dead president 
with a dead head on his dead body in his dead place 
with “president” written all over his dead face           like

the white roots of Johnson grass packed
into a thick ball and wedged into a hole
in a black plate             like the bluest 
and whitest plates my Grammy gave
me        I promptly took them
to the thrift store 
I can’t haul a whole set of dinnerware around 
this life nor can I haul around the tin
mining generations for whom 
dinnerware was a god           Let me keep

the line, One day it occurred to me 
that all the other people singing about Jesus
were actually singing about Jesus
And keep my Grammy talking about
the dishwater and a dress of pure red
keep her not knowing what her maiden
name was, saying        Woods on both sides,
woods on both sides        Let all the fancy
patterns, all the cut glass, all
the dead dogs wrapped in black plastic immolated 
in the burn barrel in the yard             let them, 
      and let me stand

in the Monongahela so that when I empty my pockets my visions 
and my dreams I am not afraid to run back into the sea
            Most of all let horses 
kicking down violets, let the morning
   of my sister’s birth    her birth mother birthing
her    and giving her     in a backwater
     American city and let the day
     decades later when Shelby 
came walking up the path and said to our
mother    Judi, I got fat    and Judi 
said    Shelby, I got old    and later
Becca said     I prayed Let her
be normal but they’re weirdly 
similar and now      I have two
crazy moms    and I said       Let’s just pocket
the surrender and the render, let’s just hold
           the light down like a donut
in the golden oil.

ξ

Grave Things 

Would it really have been better for the baby bunny
not to be dead in the dead
bunny spot, capped with washed 
gold lawnmower grass & the black-
red ball of a clipped geranium crown? Now 
the cat-killed youth is a cluster of star-colored bones
quickening within the Earth, whistling 
along the isohel.
Now as if the Earth & its dark 
amniotic fluids were a quiet 
small thing buried 
in the cosmos, upon that burial spot 
a riotous garden stands: 
poppy & delphinium, calendula’s
mineral flame. I ride

the flower’s heat back 
down into the Earth, where Mom is on the internet 
too much & sometimes sends me pro-
life articles by mistake. Mom,
don’t you understand I differentiate
between injustice & death? From within 
a delicate sphere of rabbit bones,
hooped & hooped, I look into the deepest waters of my mind 
& soul for forty days, I fast & pray; 
here on the other side of my ordeal, 
I can say: I really don’t worry when 
“life” “begins.” & this
is precisely what makes me the iso-
dynamic saint I have always 
been, ever since I first 
stepped out of my grave & onto the line
that connects equal points of light.

ξ 

Story / Time 

I.

All the names I can remember,
            but I am no longer bitter, 
            I will count the leaves
         on this tree: one, two, three,
four, five, six—& then many

twirly tails. All around on the ground
are amiable plants; celandine has orange roots
& cures warts, poke berries you rub
on your breasts, & you will have
pink breasts, & they
will not be sore. I hear
      my poet voice come from just outside
      the southwest corner of my head, take that
seriously, so listen hard
but don’t burn your
-self on a glower. Holding a child-

sized sack of pears, I drift
into the face of the mountain, I think pears
are too small to fill the void…

Each organism    lady, aster,    tree may be
the path itself
if left alone
to find maturity.    I looked
a long time at the spider 
flower terraced with seed
pods, like slender public 
transit busses lined
with orderly passengers.
     It didn’t look any
more grown- 
up or achieved than 
it did two months ago before
the passengers came on.

Is there a legibility to have 
           & to who?
To have & to who. Without
a plot development, most 
-ly in a field of goldenrod one
drop of the moon coming
down to me. In the outfit
of quiet where I break the incredibly tall
brown grasses to make an elegant whip to whip 
the other grasses.     & doing 
            that I touch
my papers, touch your faces,
                        especially
the faces of the singers singing in a hollow
square about Jesus in a sunlit room, who prove
by being there it’s only ours
to pattern. These songs are urgent but don’t
accumulate, each one’s 
just laid on the shining
grid & then dissolves. Divinely I find
            a new adjective, it comes 
          down to me, I cannot transfer
        a message of progress, though,
because I am not 
            an advertisement for myself.

II.

Deviant I & all
desires go a-berrying, a-rafting
down the waterways in Appalachian 
splendor, summer, sumptuous creek 
water, the “I”
in desire, woodland sunflower, old-timey grace
& longing lapping at the edge
of my raft: keep all desires close & crown
them, I have mine but they’re not like a pistil
or a stamen. They come from others, do
they? Not from 
the Earth? Others are the Earth. But I believe 

with difficulty all desires
spring from the Godhead. I mean 
from the heads of men, so I keep them 
turned toward my breast like a deck of blank
black cards. I keep them unread. Like

heave(n). Like lead.
Like rhythm, heaven?
I am(b) instead.

ξ

Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, gardens, quilts, and projects for reproductive justice. The granddaughter of Appalachian tinkerers and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, she teaches poetry in her region's low-income nursing homes and is the author of the chapbooks Real Words for Inside (Gap Riot Press) and Plant Light, Dress Light (dancing girl press).