Poetry

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…

Infinity

It only wanted to say everything at once, it would pull the very moment out of reach, it blessed the muskrat among rusted reeds gliding ahead of the shimmering geese and goslings— it was in how their caliper wakes broadened out, how the pond then zippered shut, in all that surface, in all the glittering…

Voyage

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the…