Poetry

O cotton-headed kissful. Tender liking of my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinct wrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you. I think you might have been just the first of my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulse to transition a thing to another thing. Take medicine and turn it into a weapon….

I don’t know what death is either, I think, unplugging the earbuds and ordering a decaf latte, iced. I don’t know where my father is, or mother, or where to tell my daughter she can find me. I watch the barista make the espresso shots—her down-to-there, sapling arms, the left one hanging lifeless while the…

When I needed a Barden bumper for my bumper-less truck, I walked through a junkyard: bolts & gauges on the ground, wheels rolling nowhere or steering nothing, dead headlights illuminated by sunbeams. A bird alit on chrome. I shivered at the delicacy of what I could not see: a laugh & This is my favorite…

So few souls … that’s what they called the serfs in 19th century Russia in all those books you saved but that in the end couldn’t save you back. I would have thought a better turnout, more like the Second Coming but without the judgement, just the music: “the wind that sweeps the streets of…

You will never finish your life the way you intended. The bed you will never get up from is not the one you wanted, by a lake or river’s edge where the light touches each bird awake except the one that kept watch all night.

It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallway shining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kinds of places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivity they want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I read once that…

Remember the snowed-in highway, the saloon dressed up like a chalet, the auroral sunset falling minute by minute on that lonely desert town? And him watching me as I played dead in the snow— like a salt flat, the snow outside so bright even at dusk and midnight— until I opened my eyes and saw…

I hurt, my mother said over and over, and powerless to end her misery, we hurt in kind and never quite enough. I am sorry, I said. I say it still. I apologize for experience, aka the world, who could not be here today and sends her condolences. I am sorry, I say from a…

I am making a doll in the likeness of all that I am not. I know, I know. It is not possible. Wherever I go, I am where I was, as I am now, and everywhere I am not yet. One day I will join a mother, a father, the doll that was a cat…