Daniel Coudriet
Naming the City
The story of fire is my mother’s spleen,
half of it a stone in a child’s bathing suit
spreading out around a body, the salt.
And bending over the sidewalk is lying down
on a cement block, without garden, & praying
an officer will notice there is no boiler in the alley,
no excuse for leaving the tent, for renaming the rain
a window, a hand held there.
The trunk at the base of the bed
with letters from your daughter,
the one that hasn’t been born
& whose spleen is mother to no body,
is a speck that hasn’t blossomed into stone
into blood on a sidewalk. The steps you take,
over around through blood, this story of fire,
the circumference of my mother, suspended there
above the river, without clothes, without apology
the ocean swallowing the edges of everything.