Poetry

for all the horses I didn’t get to ridethe years of my girlhood in Montana.I wasn’t Terry Jo, the last childand only daughter of a rancherwhose spread lay deepin the sheepland steppe, forty milessouth of our little town.Terry Jo, whose mother, like allthe ranchers’ wives, moved to townwhen snow closed the ranch roads,so her child…

and I keep in touch with you’re pissing me off you’re pushing my buttonsI’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 extirpation…

Sometimes I read pages of books without retaining anything.I am thinking about my own drama and caesurauntil I come across a word like creosote, which seems familiarbut I have to look up. When I go to the dictionary, I realizeI am wondering who will bury me and where,going over the time I was almost hit…

They are big fans of horror film.In the fading light of a November afternoon,The gray surface of a pondLooks like a movie screen to them. The moving branches reflected in itAre like the fingers of the blindGroping to touch the face of someoneWho’s been calling out to them In the voice of geese flying overhead,The…

There are feelings I would rather not have,so I avoid certain types of texts and images—particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes mea 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 uglinessI’d find inside me. Don’t…

The graveside prayers and eulogies over,A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstonesAs we trooped back over a hill watchingThe 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 friendLying red-faced in his pricey new…

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 ownideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a vest out of…

      I am sitting next to you & you are not there,you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air.       to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takesto be human & I want it & I think you want me       to have it all, but I knowwhat it’s like to be one of the…

In the country of urgency, there is a language.                                                                                   —Grace Schulman I must have said somethingto the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by—it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls through our long…