Poetry

Even Time Grows Old

Since I forget the names of my lovers, my favorite dog, the flowers and constellations I walk on earth like a spy from silence. In Walmart I forget my change. In sex I forget to cry out. In a dream I don’t know when to wake. I read endlessly, underlining every third word, but it…

Love Letter

Keep swallowing. You’re being poisoned, but you have the upper hand, so choke it down your torched throat. You know what it means to be on the banks of the Scioto River with Josh and Nick and a plastic bottle, the kind cyclists tuck onto their bike frames, filled with every kind of liquor your…

Total Liability

Day one of Marketing 101 is Don’t sell a product. Sell an experience. Benjamin Moore’s most popular nursery shades are forest floor and polar bear and furthermore,                     for lingering before heron and muslin and lichen, which fall like snow in the paint display, I must owe and owe. I know my time is money. My…

After the Hurricane

A lone snow tire rests twelve feet up a tree. Ten years of negatives scattered a mile down the riverbank. The leather sofa where we’d first kissed spotted in someone’s yard. It’s just stuff, he kept saying. I wanted to believe him. We were still getting to know each other then, learning how to handle…

Hildegard Confides

Neither pained by blame or seduced by praise, I kept my soul taut as a drawn bowstring, the last of ten children tithed to the church. At nine, buried alive  for the rest of my long life in service to Christ. I was his  bride forever in bloom, braids unbound, white lace veil grazing the…

Mackinac

                              We open Madlibs again, the ferry late the third hour,                and you choose “xiphoid,” how you did twice before. I’m pretty sure                               we are never getting on the boat, I said, We could play again, you said. Along the breakwaters                               seagulls land like tourists, at this time of day,                                              bloated with complaint—                               how silent must…

Poem

If you think of it, every opportunity is last minute. You aren’t great—just the best last. Handed a brink, most maybes die in the back of a throat before lips can dawn. Folk like answers; they want their coupons clipped. Maybe my neck isn’t straight as a ladder—each breath is still its own rung. The…

Rue des Martyrs

At the Musée Gustave Moreau I looked at all the surfaces while you explained the stories.        At the base of the spiral stairs we bared our eyes at Les Chimères, a painting pale and unfinished.        What a heavy task he set himself to finish with color and form all the empty limbs, I…