Poetry

“In this example of petrification, the dinosaur bone has been replaced by agate and the central cavity filled with amethyst.” —The Great Book of Jewels The greenish light that filters through, Jade-pale, illumines my cold flesh, Obsidian waters bear my weight, Their warmth the salty phlegm of lymph. My brain is crystal, it commands My…

Ten below and falling, a record snow, wind— cold this deep this late, man, nothing crawls out from under. Logpiles, fences, hedges, trees, likely some of the innumerable neighborhood children are stalled under identical humps of snow. Each chimney flue stuck like a breathing tube through each snowcaked roof lisps the thin ascender of the…

Look she said this is not the distance we wanted to stay at—We wanted to get close, very close. But what is the way in again? And is it too late? She could hear the actions rushing past—but they are on another track. And in the silence or whatever it is that follows them there…

The needle sinks in. Cold snakes through my veins, chemistry that kills to heal. The doctor chats of skiing, how he glided along the empty, blank expanse of Commonwealth Avenue after the snowfall. I carry home a needle-deep mauve stain. As a child I had a nightmare of my mother, a black bruise on her…

Since I've lived in many places, it's odd That I continue to waken in Nebraska, Wandering into the sunroom where the wheat Has come up wide overnight. A girl leans Into the wind and it is I. Every day, it seems as though the poets thin; Rare breed. Of the people who have loved me,…

Here comes the hunger for the made thing. For what the      sea can't clean further. Here it comes buzzing after a stillness rust can't corrupt nor the secret blue moss under the hill. Don't look back that way, friend, at the      not-yet- knotted string—the gorgeous sweep of it the back of things keeps feeding into…

At the edge of the night road— a dead hedgehog with its grist of hatched viscera. The beam of undipped headlights has crystallized in its yellow eyes. Dead hedgehog and I neither quickening my heartbeat nor slackening my pace.

When my love walks, the fetus sways asleep, its face covered with fur. She walks to work. She walks under the trees, through the dilapidated halls, telling her students you can do it. But when she comes home, and lies down, tired and willing to forget herself, it begins: the kicking, the panic within. She…