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  • Oh, The Water

    You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…

  • Snowstorm

    Washington, D.C. The cabdriver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the car on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said,…

  • Tell

    for Mick Vranich   Back when I used to be Indian I am sitting in a booth in a late night café, Chicago draped around me like anxious, wasted breath. Across the shiny tabletop Raven leans toward his coffee, wrapping the white cup with long fingers hardened from bending over sawhorses and hammering guitars. Music…

  • Asphodel

    Corolla, the part composed of petals. Corymb, the flat-topped, vague inflorescence opened first. Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms, my friend, the botanist, says, a line inserted in her chest below the breast, through a cleft and fixed to a pump she calls Marion, after her doctor. Marion…

  • The Miracle of Rosa

    Most said the scout had discovered Rosa Dean buying toilet paper at the Super Thrifty. Some said she’d been at the Lucky Mart, while others said she’d been eating fried clams with her friends at McManahan’s Fish Fry. Of course the people of Apple Island, Massachusetts, had known about Rosa Dean’s beauty for years. They’d…

  • Call

    Back when I used to be Indian I am stretched out beneath her, the thin white curtains waving like wings above our bed. The drowsy bird of me unfolds into her hands. She grins, crawls over me, shakes her head. The long, black feathers of her hair fall between my teeth as I rise into…

  • Fire and Rain

    Rain slipped unharmed across the last finger of the Florida fire. She waited a moment, face flushed with heat, sweat streaking across her charcoal face, eye whites bright with adrenaline as she made sure that Wylie and I had escaped the tinderbox pine forest. Wylie’s thick braid hung heavy halfway down his back. He faced…

  • Winter Solstice

                         There it was, happening in spite of cold slant rain, crosscut of wind against our faces, and the          spent light of the shortest                      day of the year—a muddy cow on her huge side, all four feet stretched straight out in the air,          heaving                      to push what looked like a swollen…