Paris, Tennessee
Who joined us to one skin-and-bone
as leaves to a walnut table?
From Grace to Grace, you roll your tiny
seeds into my empty knothole.
“O our father is the spokeshave,”
you may say. “His shoulders broad, he
skins our days
in long, translucent ribbons.
Each child
begins imperfect.
It is his will to scrape us down
to figure.”
What tenons fit us to the words
and swelled with latter rain?
Isabel Duarte-Gray is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Harvard University.