Poetry

I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least—Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) I have been to Italy and the tundra too,but it’s not terrible. Frank, you don’t knowthe smell in the dry fall of picking berriesand I might be unable to find an Olivetti,but even up on Murphy Dome…

On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nailsof Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, theconsequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic ofwhich he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcasewith over twenty thousand doses, pretty much all that…

All these ideas, worries, feelings.They seem large.Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future—my days still to be spent,my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me,wherever I go.

Each calendar daydeserves to feelas rich as the momentan empty month turns over. I wish we could rewind all your daysto when you were still in them. We hold your lost hope.What did feeling free feel like,free of this much sorrow?In some ways we can never be freewhile missing you. Hold the space with us,little…

That one week I skipped just to not stick the pigfetus, or the frog. Though Sister John made mecut the frog. Made me do it, those loudspeaker mornings:Touch my heart and prayto The State. The duplex that owned us.Debts that outlived us.Mauve smell of cigsmoke and ordinary people.Dollarstore hotdogs on foldaway traysand the powderized orange…

Late March on Alaska’s Gulf coast,a day of sun recast to a scrimof clouds showering snow onto mountainsides of hemlock and Sitkaspruce, every bough a white shelfbending under wet weight. Chestnut-backed chickadees flitthrough branches, fly to my palm,a now-familiar source of seeds. One by one, they carry theminto the trees, stuff them into barkcrevices, behind tufts of lichen….

The greatest sin—to say of a day: nothing happened. Some days—the greatest reprieve.

a crane wakes me to say, fear is a thief.fear, the fog still on the shoulders of our fields, the rapeseed, the peat. in a barley field, a boyescapes Holodomor. grandmother sees him there.falls in love with him. did they embrace in that fielduntil wrinkled like walnuts? rather, they lived a life of common cruelty.she bore two…

for Erin Coughlin Hollowell Glory of rain, glory of sea icesilver as a fish crow’s wings carving sunrise, gloryglory glory of moose big as a city busgrazing on rain-soaked grass, gloryof fireweed that has lost its fine fall silk to wind,glory of beluga and humpback whale invisiblefrom these downpour-beaten cliffs,glory of black spruce, mountain ash,…