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THE OLD JUSTICE   My grandfather was a construction worker, a travel agent; I knew him as a sea-captain, his wink like an eye-patch,   the gap in his teeth a keyhole I might peer into But all I could pick in the whistle of air was a shanty,   sweet on his breath, whiskey foaming on his upper lip, and his blood salivating, a kind of poison he survived on   Auntie was the dark green storm of a glass bottle She made herself dizzy, swatting the air like lightning,   drunk on those unspeakable nights she went below deck with the man who set us on the voyage;   his bad eye sliding over each plank, moving low to the ground, like a crocodile sculling in the shallows, or an island   sinking back into the ocean When they told me he died, I retched, thinking of his seasick corpse, the hollow flush   of a minute hand passing time at a funeral cut down by rain and my absence, the echo of it heaving in a toilet bowl   That night, I imagine surfing on his coffin, taking a sharp nail to his heart and pulling up a rusted square of flesh   In the dead air, I creep into auntie’s flat, slip the quiet pulse in the panel behind the grandfather clock where the wax nativity   slow roasts by the fire, her living room crowded with vials, auntie, the mad concocter, weighing his deeds like a wine glass       SOST GULCHA after Gemoraw & Meron Getnet   The small fire that smiles between three stones in winter thinks itself a hearth,   even as it burns a kitchen’s pitted belly, even as it dies,   the stones leavened, once a ripened fruit, now bloated for the flies to come       BEDTIME after billy woods   I put my finger to the wind and don’t get it back / low light snatches me from the front step / the courtyard dervishes with my feet / thinking of that empty house as the shadows stretched / fists punch up through the ground / scatter milk teeth / bloom into hyenas / there are no rules in these hours / this is where magic lives / the blue in green / where time shrugs like a sieve / all the other houses yawn in their sleep / I am delirious