Poetry

Chrysalis

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost, as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying…

Alibi

I was waiting like a saint before the era of saints as she searched the racks for just the right threads. I was wondering after a hundred years, which is the body and which the clothes, although I would never ask her this. I was staring at the girls behind the window when she emerged…

Refugees in Our Own Land

The night is busy with the growth of stars. Above us peaceful. Shiyáázh, my son, fusses in his cradleboard. The protective rainbow shaped by his father arches over his face to protect him. In the dark sand below Monster Slayer’s archenemy rises again to pull us off this rock where we’ve taken refuge since winter’s…

Forest Neurotica

Slow drag— forest——otica A camera embedded in the eye of a butterfly’s hind wing captures gilded swans choking on cream. I can’t see the trees for the ugly irises. Like a honey thief flying at ground level, I gorge on the secret source of a runaway brook I have tied to a string. Night in…

Rich World

Like a store for the too-well-off and unashamed, it is uncontained as the fists of tulips breaking through the last crust of snow. Avast, they say in books from the bookshelf about pirates, and there are windows yet to break, phone lines left to splice into and travel on down to the groves of Florida…

Solitude

It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…