In an old story, the Almighty shaped clay with His hands to fashion the first man. In this story, enslaved hands shaped clay to make bricks to build storied big houses that will stand in this land. Both stories lead on to sagas of births—natal tales filled with first wails and nations of folk and…
from the Arabic al-jabr, “the reunion of broken parts” I must have been five or six years old when a dragonfly landed on my forearm, at the end of our long driveway, near the mailbox, on a two-lane rural highway. The dragonfly’s body reached from my elbow to my wrist, blue and black, with four…
I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least —Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) I have been to Italy and the tundra too, but it’s not terrible. Frank, you don’t know the smell in the dry fall of picking berries and I might be unable to find an Olivetti, but…
On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcase with over twenty thousand doses,…
All these ideas, worries, feelings. They seem large. Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future— my days still to be spent, my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me, wherever I go.
Each calendar day deserves to feel as rich as the moment an empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your days to when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope. What did feeling free feel like, free of this much sorrow? In some ways we can never be free…
That one week I skipped just to not stick the pig fetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made me cut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings: Touch my heart and pray to The State. The duplex that owned us. Debts that outlived us. Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people. Dollarstore…
Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast, a day of sun recast to a scrim of clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitka spruce, every bough a white shelf bending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flit through branches, fly to my palm, a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry them into the trees, stuff…
The greatest sin— to say of a day: nothing happened. Some days—the greatest reprieve.
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