Poetry |
“Suite for Alice”
“Oh my old friend now gone your fierceness is not abstract / It’s a matchless voice a calling out saying / I am here forever in the poems and damn you who think otherwise the nerve / You tyrants buried in my curse”
Poetry |
“Waiting for a Girl Like You”
“three hurricanes blew through no one / at the beach I waded ankle / deep glanced out to sea / a white fin parallel to keep me company”
Poetry |
“To Virginia, Lucia & Sylvia”
“With all my education — / my shelves and shelves of books, // my two degrees, I shrank into oblivion / as he lied and hid my pathology / report from me.”
Poetry |
“What is this fierce light”
“The past stretched over the field / impenetrable // I didn’t know others would be going so soon”
Essay |
“Dog People”
“Whenever I arrive at my regular coffee shop in the morning with my dog, Juneau, I hope that there will be other dogs on the wide front deck. If I don’t have sufficient caffeine in a single-shot latte by 9 a.m., I’ll get a migraine, but I don’t come to the coffee shop only for the lattes. I come for the dogs.”
Poetry |
“Grandsons alongside, Grandfather trundles …,” “Those children hop …” & “Skipping to school …”
“Skipping to school. Skipping / school. Skipping stones across // water. Skipping stones altogether.”
Essay |
“I Always Want to Wear Spring”
“I had planned to have the Chinese students over during spring break. A group of us had been meeting to translate poems by the late Chinese poet, Hai Zi (海子), and we’d had several conversations about Chinese and American culture.”
Poetry |
“This Book Belongs To”
“This prairie town shunned outsiders, kept dirt local: / Divorce, two suicides, abandonment, / unspoken scandal of a pregnant woman’s fall …”
Poetry |
“The Oracular Mirror” & “In the Mountains”
“the minority / which is not a minority / mail messages / to themselves // in preparation / (dying?) / of the field / of action —”
Poetry |
“In These My Lear Years”
“Lear, / It’s ok. / You have your way / Of doing / This senescence, / I have mine.”
Poetry |
“A Multi-Stemmed Deciduous Shrub of Great Beauty When in Bloom,” “The Art of the Novel” & The History of Music”
“It wasn’t clear / how long the muses / dressed as lunch ladies / kept the place open // The room got dark / though the sun was still out / I went home to think about it”
Literature in Translation |
“My City,” “Beginning of a Song,” “My Hands” & “The Smile Grieves”
“From my glance, which seeks a place to anchor, / comes a cloudy gloom overhanging the mirror, / like a harsh frost that lands / its white cold stamp.”
Literature in Translation |
“Traces,” “The Kite” & “Wilderness”
“From inhabiting the body where a third of its days are spent dreaming, traces remain. A feature in an open air theater. A whiff of the neighbor’s flower bed. A forbidden urge.”
Poetry |
“Viola pedata (Birdsfoot Violet)”
“Magnified thirty-five times, / the birdsfoot ovary / appears to blossom inward, / three groups of petals / in pale green glass.”
Poetry |
“I Love Wonder Bread in This Poem” & “Missing Soul Report”
“Because I am a teenager in it. And because the 21st century has not begun to outrage me yet. / And because I am somewhat like a teapot in my bell-bottoms at this time.”