Poetry

She didn’t know what they were—pebbles—the soundsrolling around in her father’s mouthlike sour ball candies when he told herthey would find them. Left behindby fairies, he said, in creeksand under leaves. Her fatherwore that look that said he wasteasing, that it was all a jokebut come along anyway. Ft. Amanda,a short car ride, an adventure,and…

In the thicket that is just now considering the poignantslantlight of ebb, one blush rose hip, polished and stalwart. Matt texted me today that he misses you. Somethingparticular or just general sadness, I asked. This is the way for an extinction that cannot be reasoned with. A summerso wet and cold that even the fireweed…

My father is smaller than a potato now maybe in the bluebird’sfeather or the beak of the cactus wren but where is my mother? In myfingernail? The crowd of bushtits on the thistle-seeds probably are uncles andaunts from various boneyards with their fetuses whispering together,ensoul, from bad days when they couldn’t be saved. Someone planted…

Prologue: It’s traditional to begin by telling you this: this was once Chada’ssukdu. In the retelling it becomes my sukdu’a. For the unfamiliar, sukdu is story.Sukdu’a is a story that’s become a personal story.I’ve decided that it’s akin to how some people build familial homes. Oh this? It’s our ancestralfamily home! My greatest grandparentsbuilt it….

Planes rise from the neighbor’s Norfolk pineAs if floating. Sometimes I float tooIn the brilliant afternoons of not-knowing.As the aftershock of the infusionsLays me back in the cloud of the recliner,I stare with fierce new interestFrom our glass-walled living roomAt the world that always continues.I sleep these provisional days, dreamingOf flight, up and over the…

Red brick textile mill justbarefoot steps from red brickcompany store, and barefootsteps from red clay graves, the apparition childrenmake their hazy way upthe hill at 6:30, quitting timeafter twelve-hour shifts. Maybe they are doffers,small, nimble fingersa commodity in the riskyremoval of spike spindles, bobbins full of spun fiber,replacing them by hand whilemachinery whirrs. Maybethey tend…

Do butterburs follow a religion,a particular day of the week whenthey take time to meditate or prayinstead of photosynthesize?What does a butterbur believe in—a single God or as many higher powersas exist in the clouds of a mackerel sky?Which spiritual realm lies in the shadeof their stems, their wooly under beards?In the sway of leaves…

from El Cielo En Nuestro Ojos :: An Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse We look at mud. Marine sediment cores, scientists call them. Overfifty thousand trays, each eight feet long, adorn the mud library inthe Palisades of New York. Here the language of sediment traces.Language of shells that compact inside a microscopic window. Aren’twe all windows of some sort. Glimpses. The curator…

I’ve admired how they leave littleshells of self clinging to bark or edges of jagged leaf, their swarms pacing flightin packs of years. Imagine, every decade an upheaval. Farmers would knowof their coming yet could not stop it, the dark whirring cloud which upon passingbrought a homelessness that beat to bone. I could hear them…