Poetry

I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least —Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) I have been to Italy and the tundra too, but it’s not terrible. Frank, you don’t know the smell in the dry fall of picking berries and I might be unable to find an Olivetti, but…

On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcase with over twenty thousand doses,…

All these ideas, worries, feelings. They seem large. Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future— my days still to be spent, my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me, wherever I go.

Each calendar day deserves to feel as rich as the moment an empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your days to when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope. What did feeling free feel like, free of this much sorrow? In some ways we can never be free…

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…