Poetry

  • Slither

    I’d bring them home in jars, in my bare hands,or sometimes wound around my arms: garter snakes,with their sleek yellow stripes, dull brown lizardstheir spiny toes and jagged sides. Once, a baby ringneck snake,no bigger than my pinkie, wearing its thin choker of coral. In Barbados, at my grandparents’, it was novelty I loved—to reach…

  • Daughter

    I always wanted a daughter, which isto say, I wanted a better self, flicked from my marrow—madeflesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones to move in the world, exceptionaland unharmed. Not this world. But a world almost exactly unlike it. Samepaved streets and street cafés, same slow unfurl of spring. Only in that world,the green of field…

  • The Highest Part of the Dust

    Italic Z of snow. A perhaps raptor’s nest     beside it in the pine. Families are going inat dusk, voices fading like numbers    on used tram tickets run overin the parking lot. Small bag ofdog shit placed beside a rusty pole.Sometimes even outdoors there’s a stressyou can’t get out of, spinning aimlessly:  you pass the mosses, life lifted…

  • Slightly Less Stressful Walk Up Hill

    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 the soul might rest on the what…

  • Interior Scroll

    after Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) I met a hapless mana literary critic—but I’m not only thatI’m a poet myself— he said we are fond of youyour poems are charmingbut don’t ask usto read them we cannot there are certain poemswe simply cannot toleratethe personal clutterthe persistence of feelingsthe touchy sensibilitythe diaristic indulgencethe painstaking messthe dense gesturingthe…

  • My Late Wife

    Does it surprise you to learn that I once had a wife?Someone to whom I showed my wounds, who made medangerous because, at unstrung moments with her, I wasso happy? It’s not something I talk easily about. She vowedto help me get my fate straight, a task obviously notwithin her power, but she seemed to…

  • The Morning Before the Rains Came

    A coyote runs across the dirt roadand into the woods. Light gray fur,all haunches and tail. Nuisance.                    I have seen her running once beforelike an animal released, breath ofeverything filling her lungs.                                   Desire or flight?I could not tell from my car, the windshieldcovered in dust and pollen—feeling grizzled myself,time dilated into clusters and clusters of fallow.                                                                                Bitch.My eyes…

  • Shovel

    Same one we’d keptin the garage or in the toolshedmy whole life, same loose handle, same tarnishedblade. I’d seen my father sharpen it on the bench grinder,sparks flying, to cut through roots or hardenedsoil. Same one I’d used to replant our overgrowngeraniums one spring, from the front of the houseto the back lot. Now, I’m…