Poetry

Wish

There was the time I got stuck in a long line of cars entering a parking garage. Impatiently, I left my car (motor still on) and went for a walk. I walked around the park, under the big shade trees. The ground, that time of year, was covered with pine needles and my feet crunched…

The Face of Jesus

I was thinking about why souls have bodies, what can a body do that a soul can’t, and about the Amish or Mennonites, the ones whose children were so sick with the same disease that struck generation after generation, until finally one doctor figured out how to help them. But while he was figuring, he…

Mashups – Liquor Store

Music is one of the first things to go in the general condition of being out of it– you know that when you’re behind the old broadcaster on line at the liquor store and her ringer is a happy snatch of a song that sounds like cutoffs around a keg in Happy Valley, PA, home…

Landscape with Parking Lot

In some corner of this desert plateau, native habitat to the partly run-over soda bottle, freckled with spilled antifreeze and pied patches of putrid something or other, a plastic bag is snagged like a tumbleweed in a perfect cube of hedge. At night, heat radiates off concrete like an exhale of relief in this legendary…

God Loves You

1  God’s image was in the mirror and God’s image was my grief. And lo, I knew I was not loved by Him and wept. And I knew shame. For though I was young, I was not young enough to weep in the face of the Lord who made me. 2  In sorrow, I set…

The Waning

When you’re sixteen with pristine nipples it’s hard to imagine you’ll go a little bit blind one morning years later trying to read a bottle, but in point of fact you’ll be standing in the shower in early fall in Maine at the age of 43, the water will be brisk and zesty, and though…

Blue Guide

The two-person elevator that smells of pastries makes my lover so close joy in him is sealed into my childhood. Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountain’s aerial braids of water. Nights, letters leak through a shutter. Visiting my country I am always a stranger but distance is familiar and light. In this happiness…