Poetry

for Yannis Ritsos for years in exile on an island, wrote with no other witness than sea wind and the ranked blue waves, wrote on scraps of paper skinned from cigarettes hiding the rolled-up poems in his trouser cuffs, permitting guards to believe that his pen was for stones, for finding faces in the stones…

Some days each grain of her drags through unsafe air. I wrap her in stardust scarves that float around the anchors of her heavy arms, those limbs anchoring her, and me, to all the words we women drag behind us, the ones we wish we could dust off: fat, bitch, she wishes. I reach for the…

She didn’t know what they were —pebbles—the sounds rolling around in her father’s mouth like sour ball candies when he told her they would find them. Left behind by fairies, he said, in creeks and under leaves. Her father wore that look that said he was teasing, that it was all a joke but come…

In the thicket that is just now considering the poignant slantlight of ebb, one blush rose hip, polished and stalwart. Matt texted me today that he misses you. Something particular or just general sadness, I asked. This is the way for an extinction that cannot be reasoned with. A summer so wet and cold that…

My father is smaller than a potato now maybe in the bluebird’s feather or the beak of the cactus wren but where is my mother? In my fingernail? The crowd of bushtits on the thistle-seeds probably are uncles and aunts from various boneyards with their fetuses whispering together, ensoul, from bad days when they couldn’t…

Prologue: It’s traditional to begin by telling you this: this was once Chada’s sukdu. In the retelling it becomes my sukdu’a. For the unfamiliar, sukdu is story. Sukdu’a is a story that’s become a personal story. I’ve decided that it’s akin to how some people build familial homes. Oh this? It’s our ancestral family home!…

Planes rise from the neighbor’s Norfolk pine As if floating. Sometimes I float too In the brilliant afternoons of not-knowing. As the aftershock of the infusions Lays me back in the cloud of the recliner, I stare with fierce new interest From our glass-walled living room At the world that always continues. I sleep these…

Red brick textile mill just barefoot steps from red brick company store, and barefoot steps from red clay graves, the apparition children make their hazy way up the hill at 6:30, quitting time after twelve-hour shifts. Maybe they are doffers, small, nimble fingers a commodity in the risky removal of spike spindles, bobbins full of…

Do butterburs follow a religion, a particular day of the week when they take time to meditate or pray instead of photosynthesize? What does a butterbur believe in— a single God or as many higher powers as exist in the clouds of a mackerel sky? Which spiritual realm lies in the shade of their stems,…