“See, one day, not now, we will be gone from this earth where we know the gladiolas.” —Aracelis Girmay But not today. today there is no funeral & no need for a burial shroud & a casket. in this room we are alive—each one of us tending the flowers that bloom on the small earth…
Look even birds sing in mourning. For the first time in years, a dove in the front yard builds nest, quietly patterns her return with bundles, weaves tiny broken things in work of a home. Whereas even the desert still offers itself, a pursuit unfolding unlike our bodies, just constellations or chain link fences. The…
How long would it take to grow an Eastern White Oak eighty feet tall in your own backyard? And how long might it take to burn one all the way down? Could you shoot that on your phone and let your battery run down until the ash at your feet is cool to touch? Even…
Does the rabbit know the fox has also turned to snow? You don’t raise pigs for milk. Wind pursues what it has blown away. Rain falls gently on the city and its sirens. We’re more water than dust. Every umbrella is a big top. And childhood is a name for a visionary state. If I…
It’s what the phlebotomists always say, gushing when I slide up my sleeve, straighten my arm to boast bulging channels evergreen like spruce, leafy green like a spring mix, they bubble with delight palpating each protuberance, each tubular translucence swimming just beneath my skin, I suppose they are, perfectly plump for puncture, these outcurved creeks,…
Postmarked from the Middle of Nowhere When someone says It’s the middle of nowhere, they don’t mean New York or Boston or LA, they mean where you and I are from—Tennessee and West Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi and Alabama. Those rural places where our lives are unfolding. Where my grandmother Maria Garcia Peña is laughing…
They call this extravagance a “spectrum.” The pack of lupine howling out a deep-throated blues. The fiddleneck’s golden arpeggio. The hoot of fuchsia emanating from a parliament of owl’s clover. Surely the wild hyacinth didn’t mean to bring me to my knees, but here I am brushing bugs from tiny petals as she wanders from…
I never met a February I liked, shorter or short, though the birds are no longer wary, and chives rush out green in an herb garden cemetery. One thing the sickle branch says is that mulberries are months away, despite how hungry sidewalks have gotten for smushed sweets after another season of salt and the…
On the first day God began splitting things, and time began. The angels gathered in little groups —even though it was forbidden— and said things like: remember when death and life were the same? Remember the language of trees? Remember love before hate became its own thing? God said remembering was just for Sundays but…
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