Softly We Sit
After The Gossips, Camille Claudel In a warm, wet walled, roomlightness comesin with steam. My bellyround, backcurved, two triangle breastspoint to my hips. Flanked by two womenwe lean in forbreath rolling off our friend’s lips. Outside her storydoesn’t exist.In here we moan truth. The story is part of the wallsletting in a little light. Our shadowsare all welcome, unsurprising. My… Read more →
Interference Patterns
We nap, cool and dark. Halcyon summer bursts through sky and sidewalk, embraced. Thin window slats diffract worldlines like fuzzy light. Dreams wait within the distribution of paths between matter and yearning, between first sight and unbound lives, apertures and possible light. We awaken to certain unlikelihood— the sun entangles us to your hand warming mine, to oceans like reservoirs… Read more →
Things I Say to My Dead Ancestors Before Falling Asleep
I’m as much a hypothesis as you, as much a tirade against how the stars have been constellated in the daydreams and nightmares of other living beings. I’m shaping my body into parsecs and fathoms and grace notes and ampersands. I am sad because I will one day die without knowing more than a mote or two. And yet I’m… Read more →
Summer Annual
The crabgrass grows over the place firefighters were certain I sat dead in my crushed car. The median where the drunk driver crossed arches up green from fog & sunlight. Six months later, I drive the same highway. This morning, dew drips down from the sunroof, curdles the dry shampoo in my hair into sludge. The cross breeze shifting between… Read more →
The Kind of Morning
i wake as if from another world and there is no way of knowing who i was before the click of your pen roused me from a static spell of dark. it is the kind of morning that sheds when i start, circadian layers unspool between the ribs as my body makes its way across the landing. i do that… Read more →
Quantum Mechanics
They told a story of quicksand. They said to come back later in the day. When dusk was called, the sun stayed in the sky. The alphabet was trying to spell a word. There only was a Scrabble board to move the story forward. And all that needs to be said before sundown. The slug listened. The bass and minnow…. Read more →
Where Things Gather
The lint trap. A larger version of the same thing is the closet, the pantry. Smaller again: the edges of my son’s eyes in the morning, the bladder, the intestine, the womb. Early pregnancy often described as “cells knitting together.” You can’t help but imagine tiny needles working red threads. An old college friend writes, “stick, baby stick,” to all… Read more →
When Out Hunting
with thanks to Frank Gaspar When I didn’t set out to write a love poem, on the radiocame reports of the Zodiac and the Moon in a precarious place. Stories of dissonance and strangers as gifts. My thoughts on snowdrops nestled in ice—how they resemble birdnest coral. My neighbor’s head is full of them as she smokes in her car… Read more →
The Receipt Says
the females cost less than the males smaller slimmer shimmers of other veiltails above blue mustard throats swelling dorsal fins fluorescents distorted by wet walls no one with eyes & an anal fin deserves flat plastic for a sky even if it is cloudless if it dies in less than 14 days freeze the body & bring it back for… Read more →