poetry

  When I’ve been crying. My face, a puffy moon. Heart, mean and wounded. My voice, a flat slick of fat on the soup top.   Last night I dreamt about guns. Guns and creatures lurking in the water. The … Read More

  in no field, there can be no horse grazing on no wildrye or wheatgrass,   no yarrow teeming with no ladybugs, no bubbling cumulonimbus in no   baby-blue sky, no pinkish afternoon or angry dawn, no small roadside   … Read More

  Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. Truth reversed does not make a lie. A lie reversed does … Read More

  Uber, tornado, romantic aspiration, deep psychological insight, deep horniness, whatever it was; and whatever it   was we said to the other seventh-grade boys to get them to pull their underpants down, and the fights we had with our … Read More

  A streetlamp scorching the cloth of night, a barbed acanthus on a wrought-iron fence, he was a platter of lemons and salted wounds. He could not tend. He seeded soft ground, then choked whatever grew with his boarding-school tie. … Read More

  In the hinge between a summer of open-air dining and falling   case numbers and the oncoming winter of closed doors and stuffy   classrooms, we begin to compromise my son’s immune system. They   are the color of … Read More

  trust, surrender, broth on the stove, yesterday’s bones when she was young, eva named the chickens now she only names her dresses—night-elk, goldenrod stable-stained, wild plum, a well-made dress will out -last the love, repeats her sister, who flung … Read More

  in English and American Sign Language (ASL) gloss*   they boomerang        {zip-zip-zip-fast LIPS: BIM} razors so fast            {eyes-blink-blink-blink-all-over LIPS: BIM} they seem like eye-blink-blink           {face-dark-slow GRIM} shadows … Read More

  When I want to beat up the world with my fists, my forearms boil over with an easy rage. Sometimes I forget to breathe and nearly die. In my hands are words I cannot enunciate clearly with my voice, … Read More

  for Frannie, at four months   Even in sleep you hunger: purse your lips and bellow your cheeks as though to nurse from the world. Material things, you’ll outgrow, and quickly.   So here are the summer afternoons of … Read More

  White Guy #1 to receive White Guy #2 Named Fellowship for Distinguished Position as Dead White Guy #3 Chair of University Department X.   White Guy #1 named recipient of Prestigious Grant aa by Committee of White Guy #2, … Read More

  i. in seventh grade I learned to pray in Spanish is rezar edged like razor, work & worship, I learned adoption was life’s sword: maldición//malediction, bendición//benediction, doubled & edged beatitude I should give thanks, I learned—   ii. she … Read More