Poetry

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawingsof a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hallsinging about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musicaland was a farmer, but wanted to be a painter. When…

What have you done?Opened this box of sound,warped like sand beneath water,remember that? The wavesof perception moving youaway from me. We grow farther apart,but we are equal in our ignoranceof how. No change there. Like celestialbodies distancing—like the animalsin autumn. How? This knowledge,how will you pin it down?How hard I look to trace the first…

After the protest at dusk, two policemen on horsebackclosing the park approached me and Vita and offered us rides home. Sheepish but game,we grabbed hold of their leather and galloped across field and hillto the edge. Gassed and smiling, we waved goodbye. Jim was waitingat the restaurant. I wanted to tell him there’s no heat…

My mother was once held at knifepointfor a day. The man positionedthe blade at the blue places of her pulse,as if tracing the ground for water,divining as it’s known. Or maybeI’m thinking of the pointed devicethat searches for sapphire,bright veins beneath the earth.Throughout my childhood, I imaginedhis hand. And my mother’s bodybecame the site of…

PUNISH THE SHOOTER, NOT THE GUN is a hard lineto take seriously, as seen on the bumperof an old Dodge hearse spray-painted black and gold,passing on the right. If I honk, will he think friend or foe? A question best left rhetorical,so I keep my hands at ten and two and let him pass.Someone’s sanded…

Suddenly everyone’s friendly, 2020. We’re working in the front yard,Boyd and I, and our neighbor who’s never spoken to us calls out,“Good job!” And now we’re talking. She’s seventy-seven. “Early spring,”she says, and then, “My grandkids can’t come up to visit, because.”We nod. We’re nodders. We wave. We’re wavers. For years,our dog never stops barking…

I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West.Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leavingKnown people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand;Oh, I mourn not…

He asks what I want him to do to me, the next movecapable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked.I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell himhow I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms.I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealedby the still-brown trees crowning the interstate,first through a…

Letter openers, proving we miss people urgently. Bottlecaps popping with satisfactory sound. All the miraculous ways to experience time— a roller coaster, a deep breath in sideways snow, flicker of windowsill basil glimpsed from an El stop at dusk. City streets patterned like plaid in a dishrag filling with sun. Portable stoves. Recycled stationary. The…