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How far, how far would it seem, ahead of the body? Remote takes its time, taciturn. Spool and furl, hope’s quick unravel—remote: a royal worth of dead watches. Replaced hour, single shade, the white-put-there, polite winter, strange chance. Remote turns pale and sends us away to the next abstracted space where Remote’s relatives live in…

(Amphibrachys pedalis) This rare symmetric newt has short limbs that abut a strong unspotted body. Its habitats are worldwide, but naturalists list it as native to Limerick. Hatched from equipoised egg, the newborn amphibrach swims to rhythms of water rippling in rural ponds; wriggles equal forelimbs to dodge the gape of fish-mouths. As tail flutters…

Horses mosey across the black lake at the center of the sunflower. I turn away when the pink sun sharpens its claws on the mountain. Light blinks at the tips of leaves that suffer their sights underground. Straw is beaming drumbeats back into stars. The zippers of feathers are rejoining for flight. Alone in a…

Surfacing from the deepest pool I’ve ever fallen into, I emerge gasping for air, and searching for something to tell me where I am and how I got there. Strangers dressed in white who aren’t nice don’t tell me anything I need to know. They just circle the bed, brandishing that tube that brings a…

First I place you in the garden at the head of the white table; fruit in a clay bowl, flowers in their first opening around you. Now I build the wind, one from the north wreathed in cold and from the south, wet. I give you dominion over wind. Now I build the rooms where…

for Jeanie Bauserman This year, I vote for the ash and linden trees, the boxwood shrubs, the magnolia, the blacksmith, the curator, the music of motherhood, I vote for the pylons of fathers, the man in the turban, the sitar player, the Nigerian drummer, a country walk, a walking mall in the center of town,…