My mother was a Cinderella and a Cinderella never rescued by a godmother’s spell: part sophisticated lady; part hoary headed char-woman of bitter Texas winters whose ax could free the water frozen beneath the stock trough ice. In all kinds of weather, my brunette sister was a lonely, zaftig sweetheart. When first told one of…
She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house. She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…
"Here’s why I write. Because Poetry begins there where death had not the final word." —Odysseus Elytis I sent out a call to some poets: friends, acquaintances, and some only known to me by their poems. Inevitably I forgot some, and also I am ignorant of many; forgive me. I asked for submissions…
Of nearness to her sundered Things* A coral necklace, white, with a gold clasp. We had always thought coral was pink, but no, this coral is the color of egg shells. The beads are round, like pearls, and in size grow from the size of a pea to twice that where they must have hung…
The middle of the river closed The main channel of navigation From mouth all the way to the island there You see the light between Fishing boats we call the channel the real thing We’re deciding It’s a point of commerce and pride to be Nobody argued with respect to the…
From this point forward, Regina would bow to the gods of arbitrariness, kneel to whim, capitulate to kismet. From this point: after years (two to seven, depending how you calculated their separations) of not being sure if he wanted to be married, teetering on the fence for so long it seemed he was stuck…
J. M. W. Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” (1840) How it is That up is known Here, outstretched umber hands Punch through An ocean’s concave mirror from Death’s inverse Universe —But that’s Not in this view That Wasn’t me We say now To the flame-shaped…
Holding bread crust up to my lips, I watch a crow hop past its black feathered anchor into just a bit of atmosphere. My cat lunges into a rhododendron bush, another January mouse pushed out of earth. Disemboweled, its whiskered head will be left behind like a misplaced chess piece or bodiless, a perfect…
In the end, the end seems probable, but before come many votes and murders. The common redstart votes for its own splendor among the other splendid things; the virgin murders her own abashed vocabulary, pretending to a toughness she does not as yet possess. Possess she will, in time, a rude demeanor…
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