Poetry

we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker’s underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch…

Thierry I am here because it’s too crowded on the other side of this sentence. Take this page—where do I place myself? At the beginning or the end, or in the middle? Or maybe in the corner. I can’t be everywhere, that’s what I’ve been told my entire life. They say we have a choice,…

Along a familiar hiking trail I recognize agave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca, and sticky monkey flower.    * As if they might be learning a new dance, elders plant their feet on steady ground, gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands.    * Returning home tonight I avoid crushing a snail that casts a scant…

Clear, please, as a glass house. Ladled in plates, liquid form, silica, sand, dolomite, lime. Then be tempered, shaped, craned till you stand fastened to the forest floor, reflecting. And if a sudden garden struts up, rising in ribboned slope of pine and pin oak, laurel or fleabane, you can draw markers for their names,…

In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reeds which grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shop you have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on display but some tall, vertical…

The room cannot feel its arteries stuffed with animal fat from the insulation. Cannot hope to alter its mouth and eating is not a thing that it can do well. The room hasn’t taken a bath since 1987, but there was a slight wash in 1992 bestowing the room its perforated body. The room cannot…

The kind Italian driver of the bus to Rome invited her to his house—she was obviously hungry—and gave her sandwiches and raped her. All those years ago—she smiles while telling it—contemptuous, somehow of her younger self, who drags behind her like a can. Grammar is great but who will write the sentence that includes the…

We’re in the middle of it, in the middle of the backyard barbecuing steak and chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away, red and blue psychedelics, Coors Light and breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea. Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once. A girl gorilla,…

They’d traveled one by one on their knees beneath the earth to be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motel in Ohio that held the reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these…