Article

  • Sonnet

    I’m tired of silence, its flimsy eloquence, I’m tired of the tawdry quirks of speech (a taste of compromise, a smarmy diligence, a disaffection for what’s not in reach); I’m tired of the exactions of desire, flailing, jockeying to get expressed. I’m tired of sickness, of its cure, tired of restlessness, tired of rest. I’m…

  • Homestead

    Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that     were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could     tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing     we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…

  • Demeter to Persephone

    I watched you walking up out of that hole All day it had been raining in that field in Southern Italy rain beating down making puddles in the mud hissing down on rocks from a sky enraged I waited and was patient finally you emerged and were immediately soaked you stared at me without love…

  • Introduction

    I love poets who bring us to our proper size. Think about taking a picture of a mile-high waterfall, and about that little human figure you need in the shot to suggest the magnitude caught in the image—the tiny person is the scale factor. It isn’t that true scale diminishes the human, but rather that…

  • Leah Will Say Nothing

    my father said, when Jacob enters the tent, until it is accomplished. I did not believe it would be accomplished. What thief does not know trickery when it comes courting, hands full of daughters, and sheep, and savoury meat? Yet he came into the tent in the dark, full of intention and heat. My body…

  • First Light

    A good hard slap to the middle of my head. Three blackbirds sing in a red cage, three last filaments of thought that will probably snap. Their chatter rouses the gold-painted saint cross-legged near my bed. Something larger’s visible edge. I hesitate to reach out; then it comes to me that it is mine as…

  • A Sign

    he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…

  • *inside out

    I erased it from the blackboard. Chalk bits dust to floor. The alphabet trailed me out of school. I wrote it again, in bold. By afternoon, I’d ripped out the page and fed it to the ducks. Bits of paper from bills into the pool. I walked to where the dam collects the shore and…