That one week I skipped just to not stick the pigfetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made mecut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings:Touch my heart and prayto The State. The duplex that owned us.Debts that outlived us.Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people.Dollarstore hotdogs on foldaway traysand the powderized orange…
Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast,a day of sun recast to a scrimof clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitkaspruce, every bough a white shelfbending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flitthrough branches, fly to my palm,a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry theminto the trees, stuff them into barkcrevices, behind tufts of lichen….
The greatest sin—to say of a day: nothing happened. Some days—the greatest reprieve.
a crane wakes me to say, fear is a thief.fear, the fog still on the shoulders of our fields, the rapeseed, the peat. in a barley field, a boyescapes Holodomor. grandmother sees him there.falls in love with him. did they embrace in that fielduntil wrinkled like walnuts? rather, they lived a life of common cruelty.she bore two…
for Erin Coughlin Hollowell Glory of rain, glory of sea icesilver as a fish crow’s wings carving sunrise, gloryglory glory of moose big as a city busgrazing on rain-soaked grass, gloryof fireweed that has lost its fine fall silk to wind,glory of beluga and humpback whale invisiblefrom these downpour-beaten cliffs,glory of black spruce, mountain ash,…
Translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina That pasta in cream sauce we made when we finished,that pasta we ate still trembling(we left the water on the stove,on a very low flame,and fifteen minutes before the endyou flew, barefoot, and threw it inand barefoot flew back, remember?) That pasta back when dusk fellwith its smell of…
I try not to usea pen that’s too special,writing insteadwith whatever’s at hand, in this case a penfrom George and Ken’sCollision, whereI had my hood repaired. After paying the deductible,I wasn’t leaving therewithout a pen,so I slipped this one into my pocketas George—or was it Ken?—printed the receipt.It writes quite nicely, gliding across the pageof…
How did the people realizethe steeple needed repair? They prayed below for what stood above.They hired a steeplejack to go and see. Before descending he took a lookat the towers of Boston to the north and skyward at contrails of flights.He paused to consider the damage. They prayed against the worst they could imagine.They imagined…
You’re kept in capsules on the bathroom counter, a synthetic strain of vitamin A, sealedfor potency. Your purpose is to shieldthe face from signs of aging. Over-the-counter lacks the power existing in medical grade— though too much, over time, can blur the vision, incite a kind of skin-peeling conditionor frail the bones. Your purest form betrayed the man who…
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