The inky belt of night
makes me black enough to understand,
asleep I rake through layers of
birch leaves to get to you—
a chunk of root below ground, fingers
gnarled under bedrock.

Baby sister screams from an oven
baked on the rack again, ash
rising in a heap.

Dead. The leaves stick to your face.
Dead. Your hands can't write,
and once you told me
you and words should jibe
because they black
on the page, page, page,
but to you every word looks the same,
like epitaphs spelling out:
Charles W. Davis killed Juanita Davis.
His hands were too small
for prying the lid off the black pot
of her death.

It wasn't you who killed.
It was the ache of winter,
the hungry rats in the corner,
and silent empty walls.
It was the white stab of day.

A wind blows and whirls your pile of leaves
up to the sky
and down again to cover you.
A woman along the street rakes them, making
scratch songs on the earth.
The hole of night is gone,
the sirens sleep.