At a nature writing workshop, I confessed I didn’t like birds. They can prey onto a head. Their beaks are pointy, and they make weird noises. They seem so unclean. It’s nice to see them in the sky with wings. I like to fly. I like to get on airplanes. Sometimes, when I run, I put my arms out. Birds… Read more →
Marsh fires warmed the hands of the ancestors stored in my body, the warmth of a fire beckons me like an old friend. Out on open water, I know not to follow wisps wandering on the horizon like painted gold leaf. A glow catches the unsuspecting, pulling many down mysterious passes where no light can reach, not me. Beckoning the… Read more →
Making old tomorrows, I count the edges, culled holes. Collagen coins trim my surface, make sounds in me. A tenor like granite, dove-like notes lace. Partly inherited, partly earned. This heavy dowry weaves apparitions, generations tangling threads, shorn without knowing the toll. Elbows, knuckles, torso. Knees, face. Vertebra, wrists. Stalwart… woody. Moving around in time, along a helix stair- case…… Read more →
A cliché of stardust and the machinery of miracles plugs his ears against sound bound in light leaking music; a tuba and a flute wave past on a cloud of stardust; whatever it is, she hears it whenever she’s with him, until he dances into the black hole without her. Until he dances into the black hole, he waves past… Read more →
pour mon fantôme My grandmother moves to hospice: untreatable infection. For the last eighteenmonths, they have said she would pass away any day now. She lives past her deadline out of spite, an unusual sense of humor, but even shecan only dodge so many times before her string is plucked. We know this. The waiting room is a morning bog,… Read more →
you never take me to the woods anymore / we could have watched the fire die again / the embers blinking / sleepy drunk / you’re tired I’m tired / I’m so tired / why don’t you laugh the way I laugh at you when you laugh / and give me your hand / but even if I take it… Read more →
Sylvia, my lover, owns an African Yellow Parrot that she named Shirley Jones. Shirley Jones sits on her shoulder or head singing songs from the musical Carousel. When I come over one night a week, she gets locked in her cage, which is so big that it sits on the floor and houses 6 trees, innumerable shrubs, 4 trapeze swings,… Read more →
May falls like feathers in a heated fight with pillows, most people are not amused… The wind smacks fury through speculative green The crows, confused, mistake the milky roof for ruffled bundles of bloom Infanticide and famine as pristine throats are slowly fed by dutiful flakes Blackbirds give up control and deviate their course They had to cancel the circus… Read more →
in response to Mary Oliver You do have to be good, goddammit.Your repentance is required, is long overdue, in fact, and crawling across oceans of desert would be an appropriate start. Your animal body has grown softby loving what it loves, and it loves the wrong things. I am weary of hearing about your despair, and I have the tact… Read more →
It had been three years since I’d visited family for holidays, not because I didn’t want to visit them but because I always had to work or do something. We were gathering for a holiday lunch, and I’d picked up a couple of vinegar pies, pies made by a bakery in the Appalachians close to my house that had origins… Read more →