Jessica Cuello
The town was not a cradle.
The town wasn't bent on love.

My cousin and I ran beneath
the willows by the lake

until her sister called us home.
The town churned blame

long before my cousin slept
with men, long before she worked

in the hospital where I was born,
long before her regulars

in the ER, the indigent,
lined up at her funeral

to look for her
in her brother's face,

to kiss her folded hands,
to leave their handlers,

to carry plastic bags of cans
at their wrists,

to bang their heads against her coffin,
to touch the flowers,

to not touch, to wander
in the back, afraid to take

up space. My cousin stayed.
I left. The lake had a bottom

they never found.
Irene, Goodnight.

He banged his head on the coffin
and cried for the nurse

that said his name.
While walking from the station

a stranger overheard
her words: Don't do it.

Again. Don't do it.
Don't do it. Don't do it.

Strangers in the deli said,
Well, that's what happens when.

She worked in the ER
emptying bedpans,

drawing blood.
The willows by the lake

had narrow silver leaves
and the gun was dull.

Her colleagues worked
to save her.

They had to wait to cry.
She didn't die right away,

but he did. It was Sunday morning.
People were in the street

buying newspapers,
buying milk.

Don't to the man who threw
her against the wall

who threw her to the ground.
Goodnight.

I'll see you in my dreams.
We looked at her

in photos on a board.
She was a child and her father said,

Put up the photos
when she was a woman

in pale blue scrubs, arms
around her sons and daughter,

blanket under the wall of branches,
grass in their sand bucket

repeating Don't Don't. Not his.
Irene, goodnight.

One time in Salvation Army
the clerk searched me

for a necklace.
I was innocent.

The clerk lifted my skirt,
my shirt. Irene wasn't born yet.

The town was constant.
I couldn't speak up.

Love songs played what
we thought was justice.
from the book LIAR / Barrow Street Press
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"Irene, Goodnight" is about my cousin who was killed by her boyfriend in broad daylight on a Sunday morning. She was 34 and a mother of three. The section at the end, which recounts an incident when I was a child at a Salvation Army, seems to veer from the subject, but (I see now) it returns to the silence of our childhood and the way we were taught to endure shame.

Jessica Cuello on "Irene, Goodnight"
Color image of the cover of Adam Zagajewski's last book, True Life
"Living Everywhere: On Adam Zagajewski's True Life"

"He dramatizes the experience of having a human consciousness that tries to make sense of the way the geopolitical pendulum sweeps from good to evil and everything in between—in other words, how the same species that built cathedrals and produced van Eyck also perpetrated and permitted the Holocaust."

via THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 
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Color image of the cover of Marianne Boruch's latest book, Bestiary Dark
What Sparks Poetry:
Marianne Boruch on "So we get there just as"

"Words came later, by accident in a silent room at a desk. But back there, one afternoon in that desolate expanse my husband and I and a stranger, the three of us came together over that creature stricken by a fellow human we desperately wanted to disown, a driver hot to desecrate the planet. I can’t tell you the rage in me as that car grew smaller and smaller then slipped into nothing’s pure distance."
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