Poetry

From the manger strewn with fake straw, from pinched nerves of adolescence— that gangling second birth of the body— it grew as I grew, a girl watching the stained-glass fish from the choir stall, ichthys in the Methodist church, a small triangular hole in its belly revealing the gravel parking lot, a red metallic swatch…

I keep forgetting how to enter the other world how to stay floating into the periphery after I have decided on earth. One key is in the garden of language and this morning, after the vague stars and cars of night have turned back into the everyday, I am reading as the way to enter…

To give thanks, after all, for disasters survived, the Mexican artists painted on tin or wood precise scenes of disaster—the crushed bus spilling passengers like pickup sticks, the stillborn child being lifted from the bed, the dancer propped in a plastic corset. Somewhere in the picture—a radiant wheel or a saint's face—was an inkling of…

The motel pool wasn't flat as safety. It gleamed like a twisted muscle under an operating room light in Oyster Bay. 1966. I'm fourteen. From my room I hear a machine buzz at night through the smell of chlorine. I don't know what it does. I lie in bed imagining it forces the gravity into…

Odessa, Washington: May, 1980 These were the fields of the moon: a dream of crops and the distant cataclysm's new snow ghosting on the roadway, white as elevation markers she could no longer point to on the wall maps. All afternoon across the wheat steppes. Hills mauve with slant-light, spring wheat green-graying to the horizon….

In the last grove of ohia, mamane, and gray-green koa at the top of the Mauna Loa Strip Road, we met a ranger coming down. He had been hunting a feral goat that had broken through the fence. Such animals destroy the forest understory and native plants, and spread weeds that drive out the more…

1. The Hero He travels on impulse like oceans, thinks nothing of survival. Is one body. Keeps a log. “Dangers fly back and forth over us, sometimes descend.” His job is to keep the ship whole, keep it from scattering the waves. To hold onto the cargo, increase it. 2. Travel The ship's christened Resolution…

These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

In my dreams Buffalo Bill busts down my door with his furry voice. It's like summer lightning, but the strike and the brush fire—the oily sparks of buckskin, sombrero and crimson shirt— shriek to the floor and fizzle out before the hungry calm sets in. I am empty as a mountain, choked with scree and…