Poetry

  • Dead Fox

    We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to my childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges.? This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap? under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa.? But moving up the trail, we caught a…

  • Mop Without Stick

    I am on my knees again, mop without stick, over old fir trees turned into flooring. A thought stood once in the middle, near the cookstove, left heel and right heel. Left hand and right hand, I wash around it. Thought without handle, thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti. One breath, another, one corner…

  • Whale Watching in Iceland

    Scarcely had our break-of-day whale-watching trip on Faxafloi Bay been canceled because of high waves than our house-minding daughter would weigh in with the news her dog, the selfsame stray we took in fifteen years ago, has died. She insists on digging Toto’s grave hard by Oscar’s, there on the crest of the leach field….

  • Either Or

    Death, in the orderly procession of random events on this gradually expiring planet crooked in a negligible arm of a minor galaxy adrift among millions of others bursting apart in the amnion of space, will, said Socrates, be either a dreamless slumber without end or a migration of the soul from one place to another,…

  • Fat Ass

    The woman in the next cubicle: fat ass, the man on the train: fat ass, the director of the nonprofit where I work (though always dieting): fat ass and a bitch. Me on my fourth cookie: fat ass. My mom in her chair: fat ass. My dad in his chair (reclining): fat ass, and my…