Each calendar daydeserves to feelas rich as the momentan empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your daysto when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope.What did feeling free feel like,free of this much sorrow?In some ways we can never be freewhile missing you. Hold the space with us,little…
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,…
Translated from the Spanish by Pablo Medina That pasta in cream sauce we made when we finished,that pasta we ate still trembling(we left the water on the stove,on a very low flame,and fifteen minutes before the endyou flew, barefoot, and threw it inand barefoot flew back, remember?) That pasta back when dusk fellwith its smell of…
You’re kept in capsules on the bathroom counter, a synthetic strain of vitamin A, sealedfor potency. Your purpose is to shieldthe face from signs of aging. Over-the-counter lacks the power existing in medical grade— though too much, over time, can blur the vision, incite a kind of skin-peeling conditionor frail the bones. Your purest form betrayed the man who…
Before your birth, I marked you as my own,the way I marked your mother before hers.Inscribed on every cell of every bone,the standard of my family never blurs.I coil between the makings of your bedand in the small hours whisper you awake.I poison every sentence in your headand all those comforts other people take.Eat salmon, buy a doodle, down the pillsthe doctor tenders…
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