Poetry |
“Death Was My Doula”
“The priest at my wedding / crossed our marriage and last rites in a two-for-one special / with a wink and promise to see our favorite guests again / before the year was out.”
Poetry |
“Why I Am Not a Mother” & “Inheritance”
“She improved everything / she touched, re-hemming her skirts with // lace, replacing the plain blue buttons / on a winter coat with a set of red leather, / twisted to fashionable knots.”
Poetry |
“April 9th, 1965, Appomattox”
“I lived not far away in Lynchburg / where my friends identified me as ‘Yankee’ / since I was born in the north and had lived there / for a while …”
Poetry |
“Exercise Path Off the Lackawanna River Heritage Trail“
“But does / our distanced bond / with nature, along with / a shift in focus / so far from where we are, / mean we already seek answers / elsewhere?”
Poetry |
“Five Ways of Being Alone,” “Sunday Morning, March 13, 2022” & “Rules for the Dance”
“He can never get the help / that would help him feel / the help that he never received. // And therefore he / is beyond help.”
Poetry |
“Entering the Genome” & “Dirge for a Dying Barn”
“The DNA comes back / whispering secrets / you can’t connect / to anything you know.”
Poetry |
“Little Soul Contemplates Skin as the Largest Organ of the Body”
“I wanted to be heard by // everyone in my life exactly as I / sounded to myself, wing, singing, but the words / kept imploding like the fragile / soap bubbles I tried to blow gently / to the top of our elm …”
Poetry |
“The Libyan Poet Recites in Brighton, Massachusetts Before He Is Prepped for Surgery”
“Would our bus stop take him / To St. Elizabeth’s in the morning? / Scheduled for the anaesthesiologist, / He said “abdomen” as if I could understand.”
Poetry |
“First Haircut” & “Scientists Overlooked the Snake Clitoris, Until Now”
“I looked down at the wisps that still held the shape / of curls, the small tunnels of hair I’d finger on my head / to distract myself from whatever was going on …”
Poetry |
“Leaving Childhood” & “At the County Fair”
“Suddenly, I felt sad for the hardness / of polished floors where things hit and break, / get swept up, tossed in the trash, not left // where they fall, to be buried under / layers of earth …”
Poetry |
“I Dream About Buying a Gun”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, / I don’t want to cause sorrow or pain. / I don’t want to kill my enemies, / but I dream about buying a gun.”
Poetry |
“After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain”
“I found a quail’s nest under sage plants near the house / woven, I think, while we were traveling, / & the yard seemed abandoned. // The hen burst out under a torrent of hose-water / I unknowingly sprayed into the leaves.”
Poetry |
“Reading Nadezhda Mandelstam in Virgin Islands National Park”
“Every trinket and provision and provocation arrives / By ships riding over sunken ships few remember. / The sea turtles surface for air only when it is safe. / Time is boats rocking their length against waves.”
Poetry |
“Returning” & “Shimmer”
“… we pass what once was America’s tallest / radio tower, flickering red now / to tell the planes there’s something here / sending sound out into the night.”
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.”