Poetry

Someone at school told her if you die in your dreams you really die. Her brother’s laughter jumps from dune to dune as they walk across the beach. Left behind, the family slips on snowy nightgowns, preparing for sleep. The waves slide stones over her toes then pull them back. She steps in a wave…

The words carry themselves as carefully as a muscular woman tricked out in sequins walking a high wire. I ask nothing of them, I only set them in motion, as gently as feathers. Birds exert themselves more than the words do. Hunger compels them, they cannot choose but fly. Words, who seek no food for…

Arms around me, tongue in my mouth he was just a cliche I couldn’t listen to again. Beard, a tired rose in his buttonhole, a tweed jacket & a few jokes at the door. Watching his sex come up was as distant a thing as viewing oil rigs on TV at work in the North…

All your life you have been standing on the edge of a cliff. Below the cliff, a river. Snow the other side. You kneel holding a harvest of roots. You remove your artificial eye. You erase darkness. Light. For the first time you see your feet have turned to stone. You have become part of…

In the pinch of time, facing an upright piano under its paisley throw you sport a jet and agate necklace around your freckled throat. You were mad for costume jewelry — and better if it was red, and soon you ran off to marry Handsome Jack. I strain my ears after your songs, you had…

When the moon rose she rose, an effigy hung by her yellow hair, a long-necked bird trumpeting doom. Old Hag! We tossed her to the dogs and still she would not die. She mapped our lives. Slit Eyes! How she could stare. And far in the distance of our sleep something wanted to strangle itself….

I had been in love with you three years before. . . Driving from Maine to more Maine friendly — chatty we were both relieved to get as far away                 as possible from your neighbors who had                 spoiled our dinner with all sorts of                 insinuating and unstated                 demands that we resolve…

come in light variable and with calm good weather most of the time on the floor of my house silence a round a pond the bush a hush hilldog Bark and horseprint calm cold like a crescent moon a hunter rode alone through snow possessed of supernatural powers composed of rags and tatters Forest closed…

you will go home it will be cold you will warm some- one your sister your cousin a girl you meet in a park in a bar her elbows red with waiting you will clap your mittens on her ears you will sing songs from the frozen territory you will stir her slowly and the…