Four Years of Days

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  For seven years, on four of seven days I walked or biked or rode the subway to her real wood paneling and sat at first then lay so that my eyes were free to ride the airy currents of … Read More

Infant Boy 1895

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  I came into being unknown to myself, a small sac of seawater and soft bones. Time and memory had no meaning for me. Weightless hunger spidered with blood, I was alive. Then I wasn’t. And when I fell out … Read More

A Break with Specifics

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  A small space opens inside Tennessee, perennial-ready. At the last moment I manage to stay by the window, looking further. Whose body is that being sent back to ground? And how terrible to hear it speak fluent silent. I … Read More

The Arborist

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  (for Seamus Heaney)   With a two-handed grip, plunging the steel wand deep, there and again over there–the root web, he explains, as broad as the dogwood’s crown, feeding the underworld so we here might… all in good time….Nutrients … Read More

Δ Δ Δ

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  The Triangle Offense ::: The offense requires wide spacing: Slave ships: Slave ships: 14-hour workday for sewing machine operators: $2 wage a day: Cuts and screens: Garment workers are agitated: Necks connected by wooden yokes: Talk of unions, talk … Read More

Late Summer Elegy

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  Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees and vanish. Without you whose love was air-thin and particular, I’m left these daughter-hands of bone that do me little good, arms fit for nothing but wandering vast … Read More

Morning

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  I sit naked to the first rays of the sun. I’d wrapped myself in fancy clothes–the glitter of discrimination, the weave of intel- lectual dis- tinction, the heavy silk of charged emotion. We take on more than we need. … Read More

tied

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  They were tied, this couple, not knotted—strands looped and holding each other together—but even. Not the even that’s caged within revenge, but even like bangs cut straight across a forehead. No stray hairs. They lived at a finish line … Read More

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

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