Fiction |
“Running Free”
“Then I felt that distinct dampness in my underwear and wiped scarlet. On my way home, through tears, I saw Open blink at the pet store.”
Poetry |
“The Enigma of the Hour” and “Elegy for Rabbit”
“When you kneel I look down, / see the candle lit in your skull. / I kneel with you, but we haven’t a prayer.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“So I sit down to write, and then that thing that I’ve just seen or that has just happened, moves away from me. The proximate thing, it turns out, is a hard thing to see.”
Poetry |
“Come Back!” and “To Bring You News”
“The sea level rises idealism falls / And ruthless ideologies abound / Put your head down / We have serious work to do”
Poetry |
“The Cardinal and His Song”
“I didn’t get a picture of the cardinal. / He crossed the street for another tree. Wait, // there’s something missing in this story.”
Poetry |
“Problems of Moon Language” and “Libra”
“Through nightmare, I can’t / stay calm, can’t trust that / whatever ending may come / will not be my end: and if mine, // who am I to deflect it from my body …”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” / a recurring feature On The Seawall
“My unwritten poem haunted me like an unsolved murder, a cold case in law enforcement reopened with new evidence, interrogating the forensics of my imagination. Who or what was the culprit?”
Essay |
“Mirena”
“Thirty years later, here I lie with a blue-gloved OB-GYN between my legs, who clasps you by your polyethylene threads as if you were a two-hooked lure, and I, a big-game fish …”
Poetry |
“Someone called looking for me” and “It would be nice to see each other again”
“Suddenly I thought of the house on the port, / of the bee swarm besieging the terrace / and of you not calling for too long a time.”
Fiction |
“The End of the Line”
“I claimed the first empty seat I found, happy to leave our conversation on the platform, but when he wedged next to me, it seemed certain to continue.”
Poetry |
“It’s Eerie” and “My Fatalities”
“Again, I hear that stream humming up / against those dark, cool hours called wedding night. / The river folds farther and farther away, / though its descent / is soft as an old kitchen cloth …”
Poetry |
“Renvyle: Night Collage Seven” and “Salt Meadow”
“After the winter storm departed / we found the gunwale of a wooden boat / washed up in our garden, and from somewhere, / decades ago, my mother’s voice reciting: Where / did you come from, baby dear?”
Poetry |
“What do you need to know?” and “Wallpaper”
“The junkyard littered its way across / acres of oily sand and scrub, an engine coupled to a birch, / a hammer tied by grass.”
Essay |
“Let Us Once Again Praise Creative Writing Workshops”
“For the aspiring poet and teacher of poetry, what better field placement can there be than assimilating the subtle, helpful, and uncompromising critiques of one’s own drafts, as well as one’s classmates’ drafts, by poets of rare accomplishment?”