Poetry |
“Hip Check” and “Convent”
“When one lights on my wrist softly / my mind fails — an easy rush of wild trust / that cold will protect me, simply alter // my chemistry …”
Poetry |
“Hatboxes”
“Every / carpetbag and portmanteau that’s ever / been bumped along a corduroy road is broken / and our jeunesse is gone …”
Essay |
“The Weather Brewer”
“The whacks, the wallops, burning the underside of an arm, the rake of one ringed hand along a ridge of boy-skin — all of these were consistent in exceeding their ostensible cause.”
Poetry |
“Lumiere Premieres”
“The two together keep time — / suddenly ah there’s steam / and a puff of smoke. / Quick break for a drink.”
Fiction |
from Days
“… all the ways in which nature is animal, nature is human, and then swallows the human, absorbs it like its own blood, poor or rich, all of us roaming in our clothes like divots, like bumps with mirrors coming out of them …”
Poetry |
“Clearcut,” “My Dead Husband’s Birthday” and “Heartbeats in a Pandemic”
“I’ve built a stone chambered cairn / where I can buffer the worst of grief. / Most days it stands firm, glinting in / muffled light or winking rain. / But cairns have chinks. Things get in.”
Poetry |
“Like A Breathing Tadpole!”
“… how she jumped with strong legs from ragged wet outcropping to cool reeded corner, when my brothers and sisters and I crowded around the opening of a hot spring, our tails retracting …”
Poetry |
“Now Calls Me Daughter,” “To the Larger Pile Decaying” and “Now in Autumn: Sonnet I”
“Now aims her life to be all-purposeful, like flour, like a cleaning agent, like the perfect black dress she said I should wear to the interview and, also, her funeral.”
Essay |
“The Mariner” and “Mauve”: from Plastic: An Autobiography
“He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic …”
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 …”