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  • The Oracle

    I see the lion as the lion sees the girl he slowly devours in a silent film— a flash of sun-torn flesh— before the vision fades. How foolish she was to wander the woods alone, forgetting the warnings, the memory she had of herself before the woods became a thought from which the lion leapt,…

  • Leaving Women

    Tommy, when he was alive and could speak clearly without spit gathering in a big drip at his chin, would kiss Dee’s nose and warn her not to waste her time trying to figure it out, why it was so big. “Just love the nose,” Tommy’d say. “Love it and love the lips the same….

  • Labyrinth

    rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path soaring trees     woody buttresses      their massive twisted fins lofty crowns     shoulder to shoulder     climbing lime-green vines     restless palms     one…

  • Doris

      for Memory and Oxford   “Apart from her roles as wife and mother, Doris did not play a large part in the stories of Greek mythology.” —anonymous online source   She was a type, all right, an Okie from her daddy’s side, when she met Nereus, maybe even a little flashy looking, the bright…

  • How Was It We Were Caught

    after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear          than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…

  • Composing Scripture

    Now that archeologists can agree That the fall of Jericho is a fiction (The walls not breached, the houses not burned), We can hope the same for the painful passage About the Amelikites, how the tribe is slaughtered On Jahwe’s orders, as Samuel reports them, “Men and women, children and little babies,” Put to the…

  • Interior with Calder Mobile

    after Elizabeth Bishop She painted interiors mostly, domestic spaces, slightly old-fashioned, simple and practical, places you could make-do comfortably a month or two, an uncle’s cabin with its potbelly stove, a kettle, a spindle chair, flowers like pussy willows branching from a water glass and, strangely,—in the air a mobile—a Calder turning like thought, like…