Poetry

  • Menasha

    It was Menasha, the name in the middle — not Murray — which my Grandmother thought more “American” — in reality Irish, like the ones who left their homes to them. Menasha or Manasseh, the half tribe, brother to Ephraim, son of Joseph- Israel-Jacob's son who blessed not him the elder, but Ephraim, his younger…

  • The Maps

    All those years he was married, frequenting the map stores. The eight quadrangles surrounding the house in which he lived and worked, he saw them in relief: he pinned them over his desk like messages, justified. He spent long hours studying them. He fell in love with maps. At night he would lie on the…

  • Under the Lidless Eye

    These are hunters. In their season, they lurch down from the camper through gray-crusted snow to hunch ancestrally: the shiver-and-shake of urination, marking the clearing with steam. They have license. When trees rage and char, when we fold silkskins into the camphor, chewing dark fat, these men take down long bows, the fowling pistols and…

  • The Woman Who Was Forgotten

    She walks the corridor, trailing her wedding dress. There's no bun in the oven, no love letter expiring on the coffee table, nothing sticky between her fingers. All afternoon she watched them curry the horses, the whish, seeing the oiled hide shiver under her skirt. No one imagines the safety pin in her bra strap….

  • How It Might Come To Us

    You might see a thin air in early April part the long grass, bleached and laid back, to breathe on your nape, the backs of your hands. It might smell like a cellar, full of coffins and canning. You would not name it, since all names become one in that time, and would you speak…

  • Big Bang

    As a boy I dreamed of striking out from earth into the black unbreathable not-even-nothing of outer space. As far as the awe of dreams allowed, I went. The earth dropped away like a turquoise ring into a bottomless lake. I was terrified but keen for adventure. I kept on until I came to a…

  • Back Country Possibilities

    Imagine a mathematic of superstition, a logic to the blue and the salt, variables of water and wind, a copper-colored ring around the two-faced moon. Imagine a formula or being at home in your life. Home could be next door to Coalman's Loam & Gravel where on Sundays Baptists gather to praise the word of…