That one week I skipped just to not stick the pigfetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made mecut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings:Touch my heart and prayto The State. The duplex that owned us.Debts that outlived us.Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people.Dollarstore hotdogs on foldaway traysand the powderized orange…
Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast,a day of sun recast to a scrimof clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitkaspruce, every bough a white shelfbending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flitthrough branches, fly to my palm,a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry theminto the trees, stuff them into barkcrevices, behind tufts of lichen….
The greatest sin—to say of a day: nothing happened. Some days—the greatest reprieve.
a crane wakes me to say, fear is a thief.fear, the fog still on the shoulders of our fields, the rapeseed, the peat. in a barley field, a boyescapes Holodomor. grandmother sees him there.falls in love with him. did they embrace in that fielduntil wrinkled like walnuts? rather, they lived a life of common cruelty.she bore two…
for Erin Coughlin Hollowell Glory of rain, glory of sea icesilver as a fish crow’s wings carving sunrise, gloryglory glory of moose big as a city busgrazing on rain-soaked grass, gloryof fireweed that has lost its fine fall silk to wind,glory of beluga and humpback whale invisiblefrom these downpour-beaten cliffs,glory of black spruce, mountain ash,…
We’re standing atop the hill watching streaks of sunsetfade over dimming buildings, you hold my waist frombehind as I make eye contact with a dark blue raven ina tree just beyond the precipice. Farther than the treeyou made me kneel behind as the wind lapped at mybare arms and the mosquitos came closer for the…
We stand hushed on the patio. Stars fall—brightash—between branches of the large mesquiteleaning over us as the scientist—our unexpectedguest—holds high the recording of elf owlshooting he’d magically found in his car. They’rein the saguaro, he whispers. They’ll answer. Andsilent we listen. Waiting for one then anotherowl to sound, we hear a motorcycle, then acar revving…
for Yannis Ritsos for years in exile on an island, wrote with no other witnessthan sea wind and the ranked blue waves,wrote on scraps of paper skinned from cigaretteshiding the rolled-up poems in his trouser cuffs,permitting guards to believe that his penwas for stones, for finding faces in the stonesand drawing them out, feature by…
Some days each grain of her dragsthrough unsafe air. I wrap her in stardustscarves that float around the anchors of her heavy arms, those limbs anchoringher, and me, to all the words we women dragbehind us, the ones we wish we could dust off: fat, bitch, she wishes. I reach for the starof her body, so…
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