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
Captivity
When my mother was a girl during the Depression, the circus rolled into her prairie town on slow trains, then set up on the fairgrounds at the edge of town. She loved the big tent, the smell of sawdust. My circus? At the cement civic center downtown. I was not captivated by the clown cars, the balloons, the woman riding… Read more →
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 →
Cohabitation
For the mangrove to form, water must move slowly, its patience merging sediments, tangling roots into forest, so shrubs and trees, like circus stilt walkers, sway atop the watery surface, and vertical branches form flowered-finger networks, nature’s prophecy. How else can police in the Sundarbans’ plush canopies, its acres and acres of undergrowth, make out the poachers they will slaughter… Read more →
Without the Tree the Sky Has No Center
I sign my initials for the man who arriveshe says all the proof is there. Bark beetlesand brown bristles, unshed. He takes the tree down. First the boughsover the street. The leader and the crown.So many branches falling. Like the boy who hanged himself with a leather belt.Nothing above the ladder or the hook.I was like that. Almost a hole… Read more →
Forget-me-Not
It was fair of you to worry I would forget your birthday. The crabgrass has overgrown my tomatoes. Digging in my purse and not finding a pen and paper for new lines is like hopping out of the car at the grocery and realizing my purse is at home. I hear the garden soil calling through the kitchen wall, and… Read more →
Glasswork
He had an itch that needed scratching he told me after this long incarceration even though he reminded me all of the walls were transparently open even though the doors had been locked for as long as we can remember the keys all rusty and immobile and yet here we remain always on the same unchosen side always drunk to… Read more →
How to Gameplay Love
It begins with waveform the ups and downs of it following the ridge until the base shifts and the crest breaks on a rocky shore the beach slides oceanward a shallow decline a memory of words unspoken or actions unseen never to be unclaimed it’s a corpus assembled across time a truism lacking choice where words of forgiveness are rarely… Read more →
It’s Always Wise to Count the Dying
The truth of numbers he said is that they can always be replaced don’t tie yourself to the mast of arithmetic don’t pick your way through the boulders and bones of mathematics don’t slide and tumble head over heels down the gravitational slope of calculus it’s all a dream * * * * * * * Imagine he said the… Read more →