Poetry

They call this extravagance a “spectrum.”The pack of lupine howling out a deep-throated blues.The fiddleneck’s golden arpeggio.The hoot of fuchsia emanating from a parliamentof owl’s clover. Surely the wild hyacinthdidn’t mean to bring me to my knees,but here I am brushing bugs from tiny petalsas she wanders from one color to the next,declaring each to…

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…

“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…

I found a boat tied up at the water’s edge, rocking, rope frayed, oars banging in their locks. At home, you never knew what might happen. A surprise a minute, they say. In the distance dark clouds, no trace of the other shore. It might have been wise to have brought a compass and life…

We’d only just begun to scratch the floors  with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps  and hang the walls to look like our walls  in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits.  Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep   grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s  peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the…

Before she brought me forth, I wish she’d known how much more she’d need to take away, the mom I knew marooned in Alabama. Moves to MS, FL, and TN, and she can’t return without a flat tire, financial fiasco, old lovers making pilgrimage who could undo the curse but instead scrape off the lonely…

We found the cardinal near the bird feeder: stiff, eyes fixed, wearing the brightest red coat of any bird I’ve seen this summer. With a shovel I lift him from the dirt, show him to my daughter who gazes upon the orange bill, the rigored body, leans in close enough to touch.  Was it raptured?…

I search online for causes and find that most are tied to loss. A child, a parent, a friend, regret. For me, the I is lost. The most awful things happen hours after a session, not another for a week or two. The Therapy Curse, I call it, covering the years I’ve lost. Sometimes I…