Body in Gymnastic Form
Hook
buy me a last drink something cold & neat take me through the lobby with the knowing lamps just lit pry me loose a stuck penny I’ll wipe my boots on your nagging doubt & later when you lace your shoes overtip the maid vanish like fog my fingers will invent you on hotel stationary crisp lined paper shoulders eyes… Read more →
Logging
They’ve torn from the back pasture whole acres. I hear the machines working at my homecoming down the long driveway. Invisible behind the barn I hear them; the felling reminds me of years spent riding the tree line looking for downed fence, trees wobbled in hard wind, brought down in a hulk of splintered trunk—but these, unnaturally wasted, splinter by… Read more →
Mundane
Light rays pierce the dense clouds. They crack open oozing daybreak. Seagulls swing back and forth in the air as vines. Glazed in shades of peach, thoughts contort into origami birds They perch at the edge of daydreams. Inspiration rushes in and dissipates with the white tide and movement of the sun toward the work day. Ahead, a broken kite… Read more →
Lately
we’ve been signing across a wide expanse of green as questions cast shadows while we mouth hopes slowly accompanied by clarifying gestures with twinkling understanding emerging or fading overhead
Extinction Studies
Over a year she chronicles in two dimensions, names, and smudges : Bramble Cay Melomys little rat, you were her first, mosaic-tailed, indigenous to your Torres Strait, and — “dubious honour”— first Australian species victim to rising seas, she traces your erasure Bushwren xenicus longpipes, little wren, the second, each feather’s hairlike threads, curled claw, startle of white brow, her… Read more →
The Day Buzz Aldrin Visited
We were coming home from piano when I lurched from the backseat to grab mom’s shoulder, pointing with my other hand to the usually staid, six feet of hibiscus outside her car window, my sister’s front-seat head joining ours in rotation until six, dilating pupils landed on the massive bee swarm near the bush’s top. I remember it looking like… Read more →
Autumn Leaf
“I hope I can be the autumn leaf, who looked at the sky and lived. And when it was time to leave, gracefully it knew life was a gift.” ~ Dodinsky Robins scream at the sky as ifto steal daylight, whose shadows crossthe Dubuque Riverwalk, whereI hold an autumn leaf to the heavens:gilded translucency brightensthe edges of my fingertips likesunlight… Read more →
Fire Beetles
Their skin is the black ash of paper —they skim the still burning woods for a place to nest. I like to think of themlike a friend who can sense a crisis from a continent away: shefinds the breaking apart and blackening of a body eaten by its own heat and seesa place to grow. Their teeth have the hold… Read more →