Poetry

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   …even if all the animals are oracles, I don’t want to have a bee under my pillow, even if it’s just a sign of the druidic image of community, even if it signifies the solar dance of the bee replicating the hive of the many in the streets or the village, signified clairvoyants of ultraviolet…

Horse Fantasies

for all the horses I didn’t get to ride the years of my girlhood in Montana. I wasn’t Terry Jo, the last child and only daughter of a rancher whose spread lay deep in the sheepland steppe, forty miles south of our little town. Terry Jo, whose mother, like all the ranchers’ wives, moved to…

Wolves Keep in Touch by Howling

and I keep in touch with you’re pissing me off you’re pushing my buttons I’m not interested in rescheduling Listen! Do you hear that? That’s my tongue licking a laceration, a bloody metacarpal, a fracture; that’s my nasal baritone, my UUUUUU unfurling your foothold. Wolves keep in touch, and I with my keen sense sense…

Reading

Sometimes I read pages of books without retaining anything. I am thinking about my own drama and caesura until I come across a word like creosote, which seems familiar but I have to look up. When I go to the dictionary, I realize I am wondering who will bury me and where, going over the…

Bare Trees

They are big fans of horror film. In the fading light of a November afternoon, The gray surface of a pond Looks like a movie screen to them. The moving branches reflected in it Are like the fingers of the blind Groping to touch the face of someone Who’s been calling out to them In…

Writing

There are feelings I would rather not have, so I avoid certain types of texts and images— particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes me a better person, but, in actuality, it also makes me a coward. Am I so afraid I’ll enjoy some ridiculously sexist fantasy? I’m not sure what I’d do with the…

The Interment

The graveside prayers and eulogies over, A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstones As we trooped back over a hill watching The wind lift the widow’s skirt higher and higher, While the undertaker ran after us, Waving an umbrella someone had left behind. We couldn’t help but think of our friend…

What Is Left Here

Out in the open, there is a cowshed. There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet— You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your own ideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a…