I always wanted a daughter, which is to say, I wanted a better self, flicked from my marrow—made flesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones to move in the world, exceptional and unharmed. Not this world. But a world almost exactly unlike it. Same paved streets and street cafés, same slow unfurl of…
Italic Z of snow. A perhaps raptor’s nest beside it in the pine. Families are going in at dusk, voices fading like numbers on used tram tickets run over in the parking lot. Small bag of dog shit placed beside a rusty pole. Sometimes even outdoors there’s a stress you can’t get out of, spinning…
for MW How do you hope to survive? & not just that: was it even the question? By midday the fog was burning off;; screech & call beside the anyway::: ::: the parent osprey had gone out looking for the right fish (did it fear stone?) & bryophytes rested on the soil as…
after Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) I met a hapless man a literary critic —but I’m not only that I’m a poet myself— he said we are fond of you your poems are charming but don’t ask us to read them we cannot there are certain poems we simply cannot tolerate the…
Does it surprise you to learn that I once had a wife? Someone to whom I showed my wounds, who made me dangerous because, at unstrung moments with her, I was so happy? It’s not something I talk easily about. She vowed to help me get my fate straight, a task obviously not within her…
A coyote runs across the dirt road and into the woods. Light gray fur, all haunches and tail. Nuisance. I have seen her running once before like an animal released, breath of everything filling her lungs. Desire or flight? I could not tell from my car, the windshield covered in dust and pollen—feeling grizzled myself,…
Same one we’d kept in the garage or in the toolshed my whole life, same loose handle, same tarnished blade. I’d seen my father sharpen it on the bench grinder, sparks flying, to cut through roots or hardened soil. Same one I’d used to replant our overgrown geraniums one spring,…
Ignore that I am invisible to you, a man old enough to call a girl a girl when I see one. Ignore how I am held up by a half-Windsor slouched under teeth yellow as a work day is endless. Ignore the depth of my voice and listen. It’s not the van. Or…
Not my daughter and me saying once, and once again, to remember we need tofu. But more me saying, please call if you’re going to be really late. And then we’re way past re-, and eyerolls won’t undo it, and compulsion won’t let the mind rev any way but. There’s a moth—the greater wax moth—that…
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