Poetry

for Erin Coughlin Hollowell Glory of rain, glory of sea ice silver as a fish crow’s wings carving sunrise, glory glory glory of moose big as a city bus grazing on rain-soaked grass, glory of fireweed that has lost its fine fall silk to wind, glory of beluga and humpback whale invisible from these downpour-beaten…

We’re standing atop the hill watching streaks of sunset fade over dimming buildings, you hold my waist from behind as I make eye contact with a dark blue raven in a tree just beyond the precipice. Farther than the tree you made me kneel behind as the wind lapped at my bare arms and the…

We stand hushed on the patio. Stars fall—bright ash—between branches of the large mesquite leaning over us as the scientist—our unexpected guest—holds high the recording of elf owls hooting he’d magically found in his car. They’re in the saguaro, he whispers. They’ll answer. And silent we listen. Waiting for one then another owl to sound,…

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!…