Poetry |
“January 29”
“He’s stage four, small cell lung. He shrugs. / A guy he knows feeds his flock, / but he doesn’t sit with them. He doesn’t know their names.”
Poetry |
“Messages”
“The porch light shining on my bedroom ceiling / means my son isn’t home yet and the clock / glows an hour I used to rock him in my arms / with the stealth of a woven web.”
Poetry |
“My Stone” & “Falling With the Snow”
“It’s not showy / like turquoise / or rose quartz / and will never / find a home / in a bolo tie / or a belt buckle.”
Poetry |
“Field Notes: Worcester County, October”
“What seeds itself without my intervention: goldenrod, wood asters, Deptford pinks revealed when storms blow dead leaves west.”
Poetry |
“The Circular Dog” & “The Fragrance of Thunder”
“French fries evoke high school Fridays, / salt stippled to the hope I’d find myself. / A moth tastes pheromones seven miles / from his maple-dark lover.”
Poetry |
“The Con Artist’s Daughter” & “The First Time He Visited His Dead Wife”
“… if I didn’t get caught again // the arrest would be expunged. / I fell in love with that word, / practiced saying it: x-sponged …”
Poetry |
“In memory of always forgetting,” “Pallaksch” & “Copia”
“And a different missing grandfather, / profession pharmacist, / handing his wife Rose a knife and saying — ‘Finish the Job.’ / Anecdote absolute. No before or after.”
Poetry |
“Origin Story,” “Eve” & “To life”
“maybe that’s why // you bloomed in all the wrong ways. you know / the kind of girl you were, the crow growls. // the kind to swallow a rotten apple whole.”
Poetry |
“[Sometimes I’ll make a new friend and they may ask about my history]” & “Canada Trip”
“… It was cigarettes over electric bills. / It was one of us. It was both of us. It was one couldn’t drive / and one couldn’t budget.”
Poetry |
“Sunk Cost Fallacy” & “Winter the Rain”
“… you suffer without me, / who, sleeveless in the heat / of July’s last morning, / will be squeezing plums / in produce when your eldest / calls to say, “Dad’s / taking his last breath.”
Poetry |
“Jericho, Oxford” & “Ektopia”
“… we settled in the end for the pure girl face / that I turned to consider the street / down which the boy and the men had gone / in search of bookshops and better drugs.”
Poetry |
“Have You Been Watching the News?”
“Every time I look at the dog, I remember she is going to die. / Sometimes I cry while picking her shit up from the yard with a plastic claw. / Next week she will turn one.”
Poetry |
“My Father for the First Time,” “Death, Second Person,” “Summer Wind Up” & “The Tempest”
“He practiced flamboyant grudges, drive-by / destruction. And yet I imagined he’d forgive. / Death can do that. You forget, you reconcile.”
Poetry |
“Juvenilia”
“She found the bird beneath the tree. It was a kinglet, / ruby-crowned, a juvenile. Stiffened by the time it took / to find it, fledging dropped from the numbered nest.”
Poetry |
“Souvenir From the Gone World”
“I asked the address / of his childhood home // and was told, It’s on Second Avenue — / You go down a little hill, / then half way up a hill …”