Poetry

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…

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…

In what was probably an interview with Krista Tippett, or maybe it was Rachel Zucker’s conversation with Carl Phillips, the question arose if we are the same person we once were (always are) or if something changes to a point of no return. I made it my mission to return to Prospect Park after four…

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…

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…

                              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…

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…

My mother has never died yet. My father has died oh so many years ago. I have never died yet though I have not died from trying. What is the most profound tragedy that can befall a family? And the dream answered: The death of the primary wage-earner. My sister has never died yet though…

a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think about how the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solely on what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind, yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterday there was no sign of the…