Poetry

What kind of school is this? Two little girls attend the hearing. We take a recess, and the children play in the courtyard. The girls had heard of their cousin’s cruelty, his sexual assault. The girls are chatter birds on a wire, feathers oiled. They twitter back at us: liar, liar. Only a few birds…

My father thought I was old enough to learn about Hiroshima. We were walking in light snow among the newly built houses at Caldwell. Many were unfinished. A droplight hung from the butt of an exposed beam. The bricks in a wheelbarrow had frozen in a heap. Hammers lay scattered in the stiff, white grass….

I love sitting up with this thick book for the decidedly non-physicist because it assures me there is sense to be found in those absurdly colossal lassos of gravity, great lariats of orbits inside orbits, just as there is nonsense in matter’s subatomic peekaboo that slips every noose. Sentence by sentence, both, at once, are…

I want the world to change and to stay exactly as it is. Anyone who disagrees must never have held one woman while thinking of another. There’s talk of cloning the mammoth, and the seed vaults of Norway continue to fill with the hardiest strains of lemongrass. I still remember the day my daughter came…

The SOAP note (an acronym for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) is a method of documentation employed by healthcare providers. —Wikipedia   S / The patient’s chief complaint is that he no longer feels immortal, even when he flies. He reports a fire beneath his shoulder blade that radiates to the left arm. It hurts to make music.   He reports…

In summer, it hurts to look up, so I name wheeling birds by their shadows: bald eagle, Cooper’s hawk. In the water, ripples angle into arrowheads aimed at marshland. Wheeling, a watchful turning, the city where my grandmother lived, married, worked as a typist. Arrowheads, shards of obsidian she gave me when grandfather died. I…

Here we have wide margins for achieving second childhood. Napping is a kind of reverence. We listen for what happens as we doze. We rise and organize ourselves into clamorous sections: the great aunts shout one part, the great uncles another. Here we flash through each other, clapping like cymbals. Inside spills outside, outside spills…

A blur of movement where it does not belong, a white floater in the window’s darkening eye.   A plastic bag, I think, caught in an updraft or a bit of the dying yucca’s autumn fluff,   but I discover it is a hawk, all muscled breast and feathered intent, settling to perch in the…

The museum is nearly empty the day we visit the Mitchell retrospective. We can wander, painting to painting. He removes his blue-framed glasses, leaning close. The modernists, he says, painted for the home, not galleries. We should be viewing these pictures seated in wingbacks. At ninety, he is my oldest friend. At ninety, he’s lost…