It’s what the phlebotomists always say, gushing when I slide up my sleeve, straighten my arm to boast bulging channels evergreen like spruce, leafy green like a spring mix, they bubble with delight palpating each protuberance, each tubular translucence swimming just beneath my skin, I suppose they are, perfectly plump for puncture, these outcurved creeks, transporters of blood—I’ve been thinking about blood, I’ve been thinking…
Does the rabbit know the fox has also turned to snow?You don’t raise pigs for milk.Wind pursues what it has blown away. Rain fallsgently on the city and its sirens. We’re more water than dust.Every umbrella is a big top.And childhood is a name for a visionary state.If I didn’t try to teach, I’d have…
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 she believes she has been…
a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think abouthow the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solelyon what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind,yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterdaythere was no sign of the child. No warning between…
“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 upat the water’s edge,rocking, rope frayed, oarsbanging in their locks. At home, you neverknew what mighthappen. A surprisea minute, they say. In the distancedark clouds, no traceof the other shore.It might have been wise to havebrought a compassand life jacket,to have packed a lunch.
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 samedark as the…
Before she brought me forth, I wish she’d knownhow much more she’d need to take away, the momI knew marooned in Alabama. Moves to MS, FL,and TN, and she can’t return without a flat tire,financial fiasco, old lovers making pilgrimagewho could undo the curse but instead scrape offthe lonely single dad veneer, let kindnesses findtheir…
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