Stare into smoke and you can see angels.
They hide in mirrors, too, mourning moonless
nights when touch pleasures are not theirs.  
 
They gaze into roses glittering among faces black
with oblivion, draw blood to the surface.
 
Angels sleep in rain gutters padded with leaves. In tall
reeds, they swim, eating tinsel, wings spangled
by moonlight. They welcome the snake’s embrace.
 
Angels are burning to strip you down.  They hold
broken hearts smoldering in old hotels.

Thirty years bent to a sewing machine
in a row in a shop without air-conditioning,
my mother sat side by side with other Italian women,
 
daughters of immigrants, no high school diplomas.
They made pastel party dresses in taffeta, crepe,
chiffon for girls like me, for proms, for sweet sixteens.
 
The shopwomen ate spinach omelets, brought
coffee in a silvered thermos, shared the news of sales:
artichokes: five for a dollar, chicken: twenty-nine cents
 
a pound, sent their children to college. No lunches out.
My mother’s income, paid by the piece, was less
than the minimum wage I earned selling candy
 
at the movie theater and checking out groceries.
I read Robert Pinsky’s poem “Shirt,” his details
of the Triangle Factory fire about those women
 
whose only escape was jumping out the window.
How many times my mother told that sweatshop story.
“Those poor girls were burned beyond recognition!”
 
as if she’d been there in the flames,
although she wasn’t born yet.
If my mother were here now,
 
I’d read her that poem.
And this one.