Poetry

That one week I skipped just to not stick the pig fetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made me cut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings: Touch my heart and pray to The State. The duplex that owned us. Debts that outlived us. Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people. Dollarstore…

Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast, a day of sun recast to a scrim of clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitka spruce, every bough a white shelf bending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flit through branches, fly to my palm, a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry them into the trees, stuff…

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 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…