Poetry |
“Outcast” & “Kenosha”
“Not everyone has money / to repair damage from evil. / My job here is to protect / the people and their businesses. / Dad lives here. / Mom drove me here.”
Poetry |
“Who’s There?” “At Speed” & “Stray”
“I was surprised when the figure I had taken for a statue or a standing stone opened its arms to receive the woman running from a nearby door and became a man.”
Poetry |
“Yogi Says”
“I am also learning // the point is to keep going, like the girl who fell miles from the sky / after lightning struck her plane …”
Poetry |
“On Language,” “Riccardo Scamarcio” & “Gasometro”
“You make me wish / to hold something / beyond the world I know, / where I will remove / scenes I never felt close to.”
Poetry |
“Commerce (from Fingerling Lakes)”
“Mom’s paying me / in cinnamon rolls // to help her at / the Bake Sale // in the Church’s milky / cinderblock basement”
Poetry |
“To the Body” & “Questions of Beauty”
“If you find me / under your shoe / let me be. // My composition / balances / my decay.”
Poetry |
“Geyser,” “Tradition,” “Rattle” & “Moon”
“Even the night air can’t breach the edges of itself. / x words in the English language — there’s no agreement. / I wear them like lipstick. Rouged over for tradition.”
Poetry |
“At the Golden Cue,” “Silk Bouquet,” “Roback” & “Note on ‘Roback'”
“If my father could have put into practice / his insistence that the angle of incidence / equaled the angle of refraction, / he’d have won more games of pool.”
Poetry |
“another year, another drive home at Christmas,” “standing in the kitchen alone” & “chuseok, 2023”
“i am always wrestling with how to love you better / some balm amongst the bitter / leaning back against the tungsten edge of my heart / that is always swallowing me whole”
Poetry |
“Like Sorrow, Or A Tune,” “True Enough,” “Every Hour on the Hour” & “Things as They Are”
“A novel should feel like you’re in good hands. / Maybe church was once this way —? / I still go, sometimes, I’ve got history; / affection for the memory is just my style.”
Poetry |
“Post-Pandemic Professional Development Pantoum”
“We make our hands talk like puppets with funny voices / while Leadership predicts the future of the college ten years from now. / The Speech Professor whispers that management prefers to be called Leadership.”
Poetry |
“The Gospel of Gold”
“’Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all / he wishes to in this world,’ writes Christopher Columbus, / ‘and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.'”
Poetry |
“In Heat”
“When sex was new, // that smell felt free. I believed giving / my body helped me own it. When an animal / is in heat, does it perceive what that will bring?”
Poetry |
“Horseless” & “Cherokee Parts Store”
“The distant past is indigenous. / The present hints at prophesy, / a country with more cars than drivers, // three hundred million vehicles.”