Route 3

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  Spoke the Illinois: take the high road to Pere Marquette, where you bought me an enamelware mug commemorating the event– and Grafton, the underwater town: shops by the water, peddling Mississippi fish. We drove up and around the flood … Read More

Memorial Day

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  I was a patriot when I drank. Hours at the bar primed me to storm the beachfronts, throw bottles into intersections, lay siege to frozen food aisles. I wanted a toy republic with flags and my own stool at … Read More

Cemetery Craft

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  There is a sphere defined– not by the city’s finite fencing that holds the dead in (as if mixing the traffic on macadam with the bone trust underfoot would undo us both, bring souls careening to life and the … Read More

Elegies Written on Water by Children

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  For Kathi Aguero   They crouch on the shore of the old summer’s evening: Deirdre, Elizabeth, Jack. They have not yet learned to read, soon enough for that. Tonight the dark is kind along their narrow backs; they know … Read More

Working from Home

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  I was lying in a bed recovering from chemo in a small spare room and the spare room was spinning and I was dirty to myself but also to myself a saint. I was dirty but also a saint … Read More

Like

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  I liked being wheeled around like an invalid, forgetting I could walk. I liked slipping into trance as I entered an imaging tube, rows of diagnostic actions lined up like bottles. Our fights still traveled like rivers. I liked … Read More

Modern Urban Planning

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  The construction site’s all mud & suffering. March wind bends the barren sapling spines, & the laughter of three students walking toward spring break lifts & vanishes, as if happiness itself slips through the barbed wire –a slight trespass. … Read More

Mirror to Mirror

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  “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears…” –Donne   Of that declension through self-similars I’m thinking, of galaxies spiraling in the whorls of her fingers, lighting the very nerves of me; she quakes; I likewise in her … Read More

Pequod

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  You should go out, you should go out because if you stay in you’ll write another suicide poem, another little plea bargain to a judge who isn’t there, isn’t with you in the room with the window. Go out … Read More

Tricks of Light

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  You would think the robin hammering my windows relentlessly, days on end, would give himself a break. Yet, again and again, he attacks his image, marking the glass with yellow streaks of beak. Window-pecking bird! Imagined rivals craze you. … Read More

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