Poetry

City-born, we’d never lived in view of a horizon,   or beneath the expansive blue above sheep,   but rent in Iowa was cheap, including more green   beans than we could eat, wildflowers grew from water   in empty jars. In fall, the hardwoods burn without   a fire and make no excuse for…

After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…

Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                Today I misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky, thousands of them, a photo of their corpses in the Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler. Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity. Die-off. An airplane…

—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable— strangers dressed in black, walking away or toward a hole in the ground, each a version of you. Seven hundred reasons to dig holes in the earth—some look for water, some need a fence. Some for this seed, some for that body. my God, your body. When…

When the home-aid nurse comes to check on my mother’s drainage tube I am sharpening my knives with my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximity to the toxin, I entertain the thought that disease might be seen as a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper. Come a…

What you snuck past: a vast  copper body, two plastic hands  all the better to twist you from  this empty palace. You are not yet  who you will be, little sac  of yolk, blood clot drifting through.  What should we do with you  who bedded down in a field  of red clover? You want   a piece of cake, meat silky  and tender, slipping…

The old city rushes into me as soon as the plane descends, and my drunk bravado shudders. I swear to myself that I will not confront my family with my suffering this time around. I’ll be a civilized person instead and keep longstanding resentment to myself. Even the part of me that is gristle and…