Poetry |
“Mother’s Day” & “Bad birds”
“Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, / trying to believe in patience / as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water …”
Poetry |
“Gold Watch” & “Autumn”
“A person is a grieving monster, / said Aeschylus, the past / shapeless as muscle and expressed / as a faceless mass. It’s crawling out to eat.”
Poetry |
“After a Language Is Lost”
“My tongue, as if sitting on it / Two minutes of a day / heavy enough / to crush words / coming out my mouth.”
Poetry |
“Double Negative”
“On my third night there // I was out watering when my phone buzzed. / ‘I thought you all should know,’ the email began.”
Poetry |
“Epiphora, If That’s What It Is,” “An Old Man Walking Along a Trail, Under an Umbrella, Through Heavy Snow” & “Every Soul Smokes”
“Here’s the nine-mile cigarette John Prine planned to light, / with a vodka and ginger ale, when he arrived here. / We’re on a heavenly balcony, it’s a starlit night …”
Poetry |
“Beginning” & “The Gingerbread Man”
“Even what I didn’t have / was what I had — / I said that, / trying to believe myself / When I say myself I mean us / because / those were days when we were never found”
Poetry |
“The Scent from a Cupboard”
“breathes out what you were / & were not — / myrrh & the hanging / music of smoke”
Poetry |
“Ghazal” & “Rinsed Rice”
“It takes an image to describe the feeling / in another image; which is to say, / once I tore brittle leaves and hid them / in a book; which is to say, / whatever once lurked within / my honeycombed mind now evades / its reach …”
Poetry |
“Untitled” & “Found Abecedarian: Your Guide to Total Health Care, 1996“
“We’re in public. Academic // coffee complete with neatly inked / questions in my notebook. He presses // gold-rimmed glasses closer …”
Poetry |
“Intermezzo” & “My Mother and Robert Penn Warren”
“At the end of La Bohème / Rudolpho gives Mimi a muff / to help keep her warm. / I thought of that as I held his hand. / It was midnight, an hour / until he let go of mine.”
Poetry |
“The Chalk Pig”
“Where I was, was pitch dark. / I was alone in it, / with a sound like a chirp ‘ or what a broken windowpane might make / as its pieces fell slowly to the floor.”
Poetry |
“A Planet Is A Moment”
“In the before is / everything possible / in the after even / the nothing that’s / there is missed / its absence / remarkable”
Poetry |
“Down by the Humus Lake”
“water worries the house posts / sits on the steps // moody / made of murk // eventually / we approach the door / the stairway down // carrying our lights / our tendency / to drown”
Poetry |
“The Visible Woman”
“Her open palms faced out — / she looked like she was asking for mercy. // I stopped playing with The Visible Woman / when she started reminding me / of Jesus Christ on his crucifix.”
Poetry |
“Invisible,” “Window I” & “Window II”
“… If I were / in a painting, if you were // to turn that painting upside- / down, I’d fall from water // into sky. What would you see? / A blur of blue …”