poetry

Remember it was once gold, desperate as a coin placed in a reservation slot machine. When your father drives through town in his Corolla he feels small again, like he could park all day, listen to the dusty wind cut … Read More

  NOTICE THE HILLS because they may not be natural, the tour guide said, and pointing she quickly moved on to say the city was full of so much old and new it was to die for. The guide admitted … Read More

  It’s easier to send gifts: a postcard from Portland, used books, colored pencils and a sketchbook, a birthday card with an ugly cartoon baby crying on its cover. I walk the dog and pluck crimson from the trees. I … Read More

  It was a goldfinch. A bright male that must have been knocked from the branch, pinch of white breast quivering when I found him. He was dead before I wrapped him in my flannel shirt and carried him home. … Read More

  My little boat can only go so far. The coiled rope unwinds from the dock to just about midway across the lake— the point where the trees on the other shore unblur— before the horn cleat catches. The tether … Read More

  The bird limped through my dreams, my days. I’d seen it for two weeks, stitching steps across the ball field, swift as a jacket zipper. It’d see me coming and rake one wing across the grass, hitch in its … Read More

  Nine days since we’ve seen the sun, the clouds buried in clouds. Light falls in vellum strands like ice from wires. The river’s splintered pane belies a warmer future. So we enter another childless winter. Another month, another season … Read More

  Here is another hive the eye might climb into, another place I’d like to put my hands, as if the heart were wings at work under the chicken wire, as if the skin and bone were apiary,   when … Read More

  Not starting from scratch but with a scratch of certain measures. *** Think of the voltage lurking behind the simplest of switches. *** Best to be charged by—not with—violating a rule. *** Long after the rush of new paths … Read More

  After the disorder of my days, and in the defeat of my evenings, I love the quiet, revocable suicide of television, especially British detective shows, where everyone is driving cooperatively on the left, but the devoted detective has broken … Read More

  I’m hunting for a bird containing Z whose feathers were once used as money by the Mayans whose ending can lead me down a stream which Caesar once crossed in northern Italy while across mountains beginning with A lies … Read More

  As space expands, so too we’re pulled apart. We slip along curvatures, find ourselves sucked through wormholes back into discarded days. We meet our younger selves, refrain from asking them what we don’t want to know, the backyard somehow … Read More