Poetry

Long ago two sisters lived in a small brick house beside a superhighway. The tall chatty one knew the first & last name of every animal in the galaxy. The small quiet one could make her hair grow longer or shorter with no more than a thought. The pecan-colored sister said, “I wish I had…

Way out on the horizon— on the thinnest blue line sail thirteen sailboats with white sails. And all of them bear the name of one woman sailing out thirteen times out of lives and sight. With her faith in hurricanes and alcohol and the Coast Guard off-duty for the day, this time she may be…

Along the Avenue of Sultans     the beech and chestnuts are dishabille from cold,     ice-glazed, cloaked in coal smoke from upended barrels     the displaced huddle about. The war is more elemental—     stay warm, scrounge for food, search photos posted     everywhere for lost family: Nedzad Ljuta, 55, last seen,     Milo Medardich,…

I could speak on a hotter than fire riot time and a woman tying up her Detroit promises in a rag. The prodigal child arriving in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—hopefully to sing freedom if only for one day. The migration head swallowing its tail in the year of my birth. I’m telling the truth when I…

So, God takes your child by the hand and pulls her from her deathbed. He says: “Feed her, she is ravenous.” You give her fruits with thick hides —pomegranate, cantaloupe— food with weight, to keep her here. You hope that if she eats enough the light and dust and love which weave the matrix of…

How fitting that he should come back as blues, the whole panoply from indigo to ultramarine on two wings, as cows lumbered up the swale to a hilltop pasture, the sun sunk behind the now truly named Blue Ridge, the world in deepening shadow. How perfect that he should come back as a butterfly, and…

on daddy’s farm, the stallions we snared and stormed into dirt would rear high to stuff their mouths with sun, buck to kick stars out of sky. rope and spur seared servitude’s lesson through muscle and bone till they broke beneath brand. sometimes, i would stoop far and slow in front of them, low enough…

One morning the people of the capital awoke to dozens of bronze statues: in front of parliament, a horse and rider both the size of Great Danes; behind the concert hall, a waif in a tutu on a tree stump playing a huge violin. In the library lobby, a creature with a low forehead, protruding…

   My husband said he felt human again   after days of stomach flu, made himself French toast,                                        then lay down again to be sure.                      I took our daughter to the zoo, where she stood on small flowered legs, transfixed by the drone                                                          of the Howler monkey,                                        a sound more retch…