Poetry |
“When I Say Clean Your Room,” “When I Say Okay Take My Car,” & “When I Say It’s Your Life“
“Not long ago it all / fell to me, holding her / on my lap at Public Health / when our cheap insurance / wouldn’t cover vaccines.”
Essay |
Uncanny Pretending: on Keith Kopka’s Count Four
“He makes us ‘test’ not only ‘the materiality of the phenomena,’ as Freud writes, but also the morality of it … where — especially for a privileged white man — beauty and mastery are not the product of repressed, animated atrocity.”
Poetry |
“Hate Barrel,” “White On White,” “Twilight” & “Correspondences”
“Silk evening, criminals’ accomplice, / Comes padding like a wolf, sky / Clicking shut like a crypt — / Restless we turn into beasts.”
Fiction |
“Creation Myth”
“When we were small, barely out of babyhood ourselves, the nights we slept at Grandmother’s house at the edge of the blue-black woods, she sent us to sleep with the story of how babies came to be born of women.”
Poetry |
“Fourfold Amen” and “Aubade Minus Sunup”
“Onstage, it takes the lead / a lot of words to die. Maybe / I, too, am holding a red scarf / to a false wound.”
Essay |
“Going to the Mall”
“The mall felt like a place where dreams came true. The mall promised new shoes for school each year, a new toy if I was ‘good.’ The mall was a place where I could have ice cream at 2:00 pm …”
Poetry |
from Lointaines
“Storyville or Benin City / it could be that we don’t have to describe / but only to return fear / to the place where we found it …”
Poetry |
“Fire Ants” & “An Exultation of Spirit”
“I wish I could say that a surgeon’s knife / in the small of my back and the successful removal / of some extra bone, the liberation of a cornered nerve, / would be enough to jump start me back into the joy of living …”
Fiction |
“The Last Golden Hour”
“We wasted the day looking after my oldest son who does not want to be looked after. Your unbonded stepson. He wrecked his car on a Kentucky backroad. His girlfriend clawed his face. Cuffed, no charges filed.”
Essay |
“The Hours, Passing”
“Always, even when so ill with depression that I could hardly lift my head, I have looked for what shines around me — a ditch of spring rain in Oregon, filled with the light of reflected stars and hundreds of new frogs singing …”
Fiction |
“An Ingenue Attends the Freshman Formal” & “Tally of a Loss”
“9: my age when you taught me to save myself for the right person
15: my age when I thought he was right
15 ½: my age when he wasn’t”
Poetry |
“Why Sturgeon Leap”
“Could leaping be hard-wired into sturgeon / brains since the late Cretaceous / for no other reason than feeling good, // the way cows face north or south when chewing / their cud, conforming to the earth’s magnetic pull …”
Poetry |
“Ghost” & “Cacerolazo, October 2019”
“Three million pans death-rattle this iron-celled era. // What is a revolution? // We run through the barricades of La Alameda as trash fires glow through tear gas clouds on each corner …”
Poetry |
“1985” and “Once in an Antique Shop”
“Say in a church basement / I worked the can opener around the huge tins / of government meat, while another woman / stirred it into something edible …”
Essay |
“On Weeping”
“On a November day just after Thanksgiving, a year before a virus arrived to change the world, I noticed a very young grandson’s boot in a dark corner of our dining room, where he must have kicked it off.”