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Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder. Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea. This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells and the ocean, I’ll count my encounters with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, with the factory of liquid fold and…

A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the     cabin door. A tube top and…

Snow like the cold lard of falling stars strikes the windshield. A small thermos of tea rolls around in the glove compartment. I sneeze. Up in the black trees, the moon and the snow are repeatable in the long spine of a woman who has opened her high window. It is her signal to the…

The world is not limited to literature. I was sitting in the Adirondack chair when it floated by. Mother and Father were on the other side of the lot building a wall out of small pleasantly shaped rocks. I came to them and said, “It’s in front of us,” the sun burning like an absence….

Benny’s handsome, red brown like rust on a hoe. Empty headed cows loll in the pasture ignoring the mule’s bray. Light shines as easily through a cicada’s husk clinging to a tree as through a bottle of liniment or a glass of tea on the dinner table. The hems of his overalls fray and tickle…

don’t leave the tent delirious and starving in the blizzard makes more sense in hindsight through the howls of distant seals the ruined captain wanders off arctic exploration is no fun makes more sense in hindsight also don’t sleep with her or don’t take the red ones or don’t let the bees escape I took…

Into the clearing of . . . she climbed and stood up from the black boots of her blackouts into her body. The coat wept upon her shoulder, it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook, and in the sockets of the buttonholes the buttons lolled and looked. As she climbed into that…

A large steel knife hovers above Main Street. All night it goes house to house, poking its glowing eye through each roof in its turn. It looks in on the accountant, sleeping fingers tabulating debt on a quilt. The chief of police is safely asleep with his secretary. It was never about love. Grandmother’s in…

The best boys were called: to buck hay till age seventy-five, to castrate a steer & rescue a breach-birth calf     under a dusty light bulb, father eight or ten daughters & whip sense into their heads (their character would be their dowry), & one smoking bull of a son,     inhale a cyclone    …