Poetry

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…

a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think about how the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solely on what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind, yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterday there was no sign of the…

“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 up at the water’s edge, rocking, rope frayed, oars banging in their locks. At home, you never knew what might happen. A surprise a minute, they say. In the distance dark clouds, no trace of the other shore. It might have been wise to have brought a compass and life…

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…

We think we can find the beginning, the origin, the genesis. We look everywhere, the nativity is nowhere, Jesus is absent. The land is lost, it doesn’t speak these languages. The sea keeps its own history. We keep our own images of our bible, our Terra Santa. When you came you found what’s modern, what’s…

The oracles say the quiet part out loud. A wife is a machine of someone else’s dreams. To survive, you must drown a heart that wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt. Make an artifact out of your pain, a tribute to the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinch in your chest…

I figured if I studied enough, life would make sense so I skipped the games and the girls, ate lunch in a hurry and spent the afternoons in the library. On Saturday nights when everyone was out gunning their engines, I camped alone at the beach listening to the lap of waves and the chittering…

1. They sleep on their shadows, long for no one, their speech drifts weightless through their lanes. Gold thread, fistfuls of barley, a jar of Aristaeus’s gold, an old woman’s needle, her pearly lace lining the harbor road. Taxis for Darnis awaiting passengers, Sudanese farmhands milling about, and into the bay, the sponge pickers go…