Poetry

Please don’t ever ask me to do it—to run through the plot points A, B, C, and D, as Peter Brooks discusses in his famous book of the same name. My mind is allergic to chronology. Do you feel the unquenchable thirst for plot that Brooks describes? OK, then, here’s a plot for you: last…

On the television the boy is watching Charlotte’s Web & it is near the beginning where the whole family is sitting down to eat & we are made to see the farmer’s breakfast—a stack of pancakes, golden brown & towering—& the boy becomes   caught in this moment. He will watch the movie it feels…

Why not let my daughters toss rocks over the shed   while birds bicker and dart through my wraparound   mood? The girls remind me that wonderful   means “full of wonder,” and that no tech company   will ever simulate what’s happening   in my nerves right now— the swig from a flask  …

Ending on a line by Jack Gilbert     Want is still the center of all living shapes, my daughter included.   She’s gnawed off her dead ends and scratched her throat into a ragged line graph.   It doesn’t work to tell her five plus five, if you use both hands, can be a…

There are two piles of documents: the one on the right has to become the one on the left. There is a paperweight in the shape of a whale.   Some pages have almost nothing on them, maybe eight words floating in eggshell space. They have to be read too,   so I do, I…

“…they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain…and each one as he drank forgot all things.” – Plato, Republic     Imagine you are weary. Imagine                     you have carried the heft of skeletons for years.   Imagine the day you fear death   less than living long. Imagine…

Husking the foxtail millet gives it a new name where I’m from, the abundant attention staple crops command not so different from superhero reboots one after another, a man shedding a cape is a new man with a new past. I wanted to explain this the time a man in a corner office said he…

but I knew there were secrets. We all knew   and we all strong-armed the chesty life vests  back into their shed like lovers   backed into closets.                                            Only at that lake  did I play spies; only there did I try   writing with my sinister hand:   Tin of poison in nightstand.    But it was just…

My student spends his summers in city cemeteries, clipping the scruff that grows too close to the stones   or anywhere the mowers can’t go. Sundays mostly   the death-jilted come, some to pledge the stiff with a fifth, some to Windex the pane of granite. Some of those left come to sob nearer the…