The first time the girls ask what the word means, colonized, a lark falls dead at our feet, undoubtedly, on a small lawn of white petals from the climbing rose. Platitudes, I mean plenitudes, the greenery’s plenitude. I will wait until tonight and when the bristling blossoms close, I will tell the girls something or everything. I…
A polite town. The mountainswearing purple for our pleasure, clouds holding their snowy breathso everyone’s clueless parentscould get home safe from work.“I’m gonna die here,” Shauna says, her head up against the chain-linksuch that when she angles to catch mein her periphery there’s a red X indented in her brow like a responseon a test,…
Clouds race each other across the heavens, as dazzlingas they are ephemeral. Frayed ravens inquire,Why can’t you accept his death or anyone else’s? Botanists sayplants register memories of winter, which they useto decide if it’s safe, meaning warm enough, to bloom.Scores of sexually deceptive orchids were discoveredon two new islands this June. Snakes make friends.Mice reflect…
“Why is my mama sleeping?” he asksstruggling to unbuckle, hardlyhearing the noiseof the machine gun bursts His childish torso slidesunder her breasts and belly—it hurts them both, yetlax as seaweed they lie for ages under the watersmoving along with the tideuntil a man’s voiceshouts: “Come out! Out!” “Seriously?” is allshe can manage, as if lodged…
You’d think it was a teenager in a rented tuxgoing to the prom in a borrowed car butit’s a cedar waxwing in his cupsdrunk on juniper berries.I get it.I was allowed one dance at the senior promas my mother worriedI might have sex right after—disgracing the Lord and the familyin that order.The Lord in those…
— after C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade “Beech is Anglo-Saxon boc: book, document, or charter,” she (C. D.) writes. “The shoots grow faster in the dark,” she writes in her 250-some page diary of obsession. Here, now, at the smallpox cemetery near where I live, the shin-high marble grave markers, corners softened, stand canted, like awkward lumber….
In an old story, the Almighty shaped clay with His hands to fashion the first man. In this story, enslaved hands shaped clay to make bricks to build storied big houses that will stand in this land. Both stories lead on to sagas of births—natal tales filled with first wails and nations of folk and…
from the Arabic al-jabr, “the reunion of broken parts” I must have been five or six years old when a dragonfly landed on my forearm, at the end of our long driveway, near the mailbox, on a two-lane rural highway. The dragonfly’s body reached from my elbow to my wrist, blue and black, with four…
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…
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