Poetry

Dear Amy

We hiked back to those desert rocks just after Christmas. We saw the whale head rising from the sea, and the parrot’s odd unstaring eye. We saw a thousand plump barrel cactuses, and a single antelope squirrel, and a half-dozen lizards running ahead of us on the path. We saw one yellow flower and saw…

Garonne in May

After Marilyn When I let the river answer I hear the birds, waxwing, junco…   The gardener snips, pilgrims speak softly, the creek rambles. River, tell me how to rest—   why moments short as a headturn become torrents of sludge.   When the river answers it asks: “Have you come with memories, regrets,  …

“Luthier,” “Aubade to Replace the Sounds of Morning,” “Draining the Lake,” and “After the shipwreck.” (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: POETRY)

Poetry judge Natalie Diaz said, “These poems have a lexicon and language all their own. They build each body—body of person, body of land or sea—with a precision and a sensuality that comes from understanding there are more than five senses. A reader is given the gift of feeling the silences, the touches, the strengths…

Wild Columbine

Some bells ring of their own accord. Some need the boy who pulls the rope and is lifted off his feet on the upswing. The pigeons scatter from the tower’s shaken air. Their paratrooper feathers storm the shaft of light. By what miracle does he recall, years later, such ascension, the last time he loved…

Poland, 1981

Tanks run over the castle of my childhood in December. On our black-and-white TV I see the riot police shields and truncheons. Vinegar is the only thing you can buy in the stores. Telephones turn into toys. Because of a curfew, my father’s bedtime stories grow longer than ivy and wilder than calendula.   Restless…

Rough Air

When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue, as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaper licking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silence which is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical…

No Claim

A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave. It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other the same plus chestnut spots, drift above white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness to the situation, paralleling the stinks and…

Backseat in Kinsasha

a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase that explains everything and then you’re revoking yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan or you’ve just changed the…