Poetry

  • Consensual Reflex

    What I see in one eye and not the other. A moon that slices away at the dark. The past and what’s coming. Unlike the little hunchbacked shrew hopping mindless across the road. Or crickets, eating anything in their path, gardens, grass, each other. We’re different. We anticipate. For the others, it’s the music without…

  • Doris

      for Memory and Oxford   “Apart from her roles as wife and mother, Doris did not play a large part in the stories of Greek mythology.” —anonymous online source   She was a type, all right, an Okie from her daddy’s side, when she met Nereus, maybe even a little flashy looking, the bright…

  • How Was It We Were Caught

    after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear          than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…

  • Homestead

    Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that     were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could     tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing     we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…

  • Light Bearer

    I felt it when they hammered out these feet and carved     the flesh between these long toes of mine and when they rubbed narrow the stalks of my legs     into calves and thighs—yes then and when they shaped my groin outward instead of in     and rounded my ass same as everyone’s yes—then…

  • This is the small hill

    This is the small hill Landscape of the middle country I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels This is the last evening No light in the squandered wood The gentleman farmer still awake His back to my back   Verdant in blackness is a twinkling Is a wet streamlike thing…

  • Eclipse

    She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house.   She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark   and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…