poetry

  Isn’t it my good fortune in this world On a day when there is enough bird seed in the feeder And it has warmed up enough for them to stop going at the suet With the frantic mayhem of … Read More

  Cicadas taught me to speak in low humming before my mother taught me alphabet or verb— before I learned to bathe alone in the canal behind our house, my frame small enough to fit between the supports of the … Read More

  I am at home, watching a movie when you arrive unannounced, barely visible—your frame filling the unlit doorway.   I haven’t seen you in weeks—perhaps I’ve never seen you, but it must be the movie that makes me feel … Read More

  Tuesday, you said, was the easiest night to sneak into the county fair. We hid our bikes in the woods and crawled between the Ferris Wheel and a bounce house, scratching our knees on fallen twigs.   The security … Read More

  [a survival guide]   I’m learning to collect poisonous plants to help preserve what little food I have left. In my small hollow a few inches of edible leaves insects and their dried bodies brittle wing-bright. I’ve been here … Read More

  If only I could speak. Other mouths can. What speech I have, I have in languid length of arm— a slow reaching, ++turn so slight given to tendril, hole-and-corner, palmette +black and fanning.

  Intelligence is a hay rick shining in the sun. Pitchfork it up and find Bethlehem moldering and damp, beetles scuttling, and an underlife that tries to explain things.   Dig deeper. No devil rears, but evil whistles through you … Read More

  There are 64 panes in each window of the Harrisville church where we sit listening to a late Haydn quartet. Near the ceiling clouds build up, slowly brightening, then disperse, till the evening sky glistens like the pink inside … Read More

  Why was Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 my favorite piece to play when I was ten and always dreading practicing the piano? Was it the melody—his melancholy lines, like verse, had such clarity, their notes syllables I didn’t need to … Read More

  A brave people, who sat up straight in the grave, with only this perforated sacred bowl to protect their heads from the sad hail of dirt clods dropped by the mourners; and to allow the curious soul to come … Read More

for Mark Green   This is therefore the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing. –Wallace Stevens   I would be a fool, I thought, in any effort … Read More

  “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey,” Zubair, a 13 year-old Pakistani boy speaking to the United States Congress, October 2014   In … Read More