Poetry

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…

One of the old ones has fallen in. The pond has autumn’s clarity and layering, leaves afloat and sunken, sky reflections over the bottom’s pebbles and scree. I make up names for the colors of this leaf— allol, draeth, breen— while an ant walks all the way up its stem.

How do you sleep? he asked, and I said Wait—I know— because I didn’t know. My husband insists I sleep a certain way. —Not on your stomach? He seemed disappointed. Then on your back? —Maybe, my back, or my side. I didn’t tell him, I sleep like something tossed onshore, —or the way we are…

Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m…

A wild incipience in the air as if everything stilled is deeply active, the night cascading through the tall pines until it’s in the house. I don’t feel just yet like turning on the lights. There’s an unlikable bird chuckling outside the window. Another bird says to it tsk, tsk. The end of summer is…

At this distance, from the other shore, looking across the river north and east, you just can’t tell what kind of trees they are, feathered in those ideal humid greens in a sort of flow toward the horizon and the ocean. In perspective they diminish to depletion, into the sunset’s haw and haze, as if…

How Uncle Alvin tumbled from the hayloft, broke his neck. How once a one-armed hobo, a black man, split a half cord of stove wood for a plate of ham, green beans, and fried potatoes, which he ate, slowly, sitting on the grass in the shade of a doomed elm tree. Great-grandma stepped out on…

A piece of paper Which appeared to be blank But on which we see Writing had faded. “My first is of the Possessive of those Given to possession. And my last, the finality Of that proposition. In entirety I give That which in three worlds doth live. Ungainly in the two; In all, long-legged beauty,…

Today you’re going to hike to the very end Of this steep valley, where the path rises And disappears beyond the waterfall Marked on the yellow sign you saw last night Before you went to sleep to dream of today. Now, as you yawn here on the balcony Of the chalet, you hear distant cowbells….