The Winnowing
I didn’t realize that some folks thought my momma was crazy until after she was dead. My small family had just finished our last family meal of ham hock and beans on that grey early December afternoon along with the last of momma’s fried squash she had put up th…
Resident Itinerant Drifter, With Apologies to the Yearning in my Chest for a Place to Hang my Hat
I. Impostor’s Summer
I brought no pictures to hang on the wall. Before I left, I cut my hair and saw for the first time a woman whose body I could stand to walk around in, a woman sure of herself, so I know I’m not the girl in the pictures. I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and ther…
Valley of the Moon
there are some places that invite you to pour
yourself into them all sharp rock
and sand and cactus needles glittered
with drops of nectar where horses
are lean and wild and roam the way
they’re meant to whinnying blends
with wind and there’s a toughness
to everything the ai…
Out There
When they brought me in it was the night of Marty’s funeral. Whether the overdose was accidental, no one knew and no one talked about it. I’d been drinking since at least dusk with all of these guys I had gone to high school with in Adam’s dad’s backyard and I’ve spent years trying to…
Dumpster Balloons
As I opened the dumpster to empty the week’s trash, birthday balloons rose to greet me, as if bonded to the lid, charged with anticipation. I scrambled to shut them down yet they kept rising, obedient to unseen forces brazen they squirmed toward the black open air. How vast the continuum of emo…
Coda
She pulled up in a big-ass van. You’re reminded of the green Dodge window van she had when you moved back from Florida the summer you turned sixteen. How she let you take it and a bunch of kids, mostly cousins and neighbors, over the bridge to the McDonald’s on the highway despite you being a ne…
Asking Why on the White River
Asking why on the White River, you tell me about the time you tried to kill yourself, dropping to the side of a California highway.
Later that night I’m spitting tobacco juice down the drain, remembering how I laid crucifix in the grass, touched it with trembling hands in triumph at the memor…
The Going
Had a line without a poem with a horse on fire. Thought, I should write that down before it’s gone. Worked the door last Halloween past afterhour, reading Oliver Stone’s dour script for Conan on my iPhone, thought about what goes unmade, how there must be unbearable solitude in achievement. Best…
Sunbathing in Venice
.
Clouds have never moved more quickly than here under the blaze. A child’s laugh has never fallen on softer ears than mine, now. I watch her spoon pasta, painting red her lace bib. The water never cooler, as condensation on a glass of spiked lemonade. Stone never felt refreshing on bare feet…
Invisible Geometry
My nine-year-old asks about the dark sides, sides not easily seen, and if they cannot be seen do they exit. I feel I am about to enter a black hole.
Before answering I imagine asking this of my own father, if he saw the other sides of his son. If he bothered to look.
With internet help my …
Ancient of Days
Suddenly the leaves change, and I am ancient and a child all at once, grasping their fiery, brittle bodies between my fingers too tightly until they crumble. Everything that ever has been or ever will be laid to waste in my hands.
Do you remember last October (or any October, all of them), wh…
Ode to My Left Ear
If I cut you off and mail you to a lover. Promise to become a better listener. Take notes and stay open. If it happens today, Remember, the last thing you heard was not me Crying, saying things like, change is hard. It would have been the welcome mat, The one with a dumb slogan like…
The Last Glacier
I
Once upon a time there was a world of great beauty here in the High Arctic. I was part of that world.
Let me describe it for you, though you’ll likely not…
Your Voice on the Wind
Timeless feelings, the Appalachian trail and the love I hold for you like the sky. A time zone countenance and research that’s gone all wrong.
Have you noticed, how the trees like to talk mostly on Tuesdays and Thursdays? They whispered in my ear, if you get it wrong, you’ll still be alright….
Recommendation From the Professor
“Do you see this man? Alexander Luria?”
Professor Dunn pointed to a black and white photograph pinned to her office wall. The photograph curled at the bottom edge, and the curl had gathered dust. It was a portrait of a man dressed in the fashion of another time: trim suit, narrow tie, black-f…
Contingent Faculties
Midmorning abeam, abuzz, aubade about walking our old block, applauding the view that Yonkers is fair facsimile of my twenties. I can’t. I can’t unthink pariah dogs queuing on rain’s garnet, canines bared like tracer bullets at the street – nothing new about collaborating with synecdoche of ones…
White as Snow
A checkered powder blue dress on Sunday morning—Easter Red, the color of a leaf in autumn, tied up with a matching ribbon Little white shoes cradled on small feet, not quite touching the carpet under the wooden pew Notes of a piano began, my feet swinging and swaying inches above the ground, Bac…
When the Whitewater Thickens
between waves woven so tight they bury the wreckage,
trust the current to breathe you to the surface
& catch the breath in the split second between breaks before
brine heaves let the salt sting,
a sky so swollen asphyxiates, let the wind out of your lungs
let it wail, hammer a…
Wilting Winters
I ponder on the idea of great fields,
Petals falling from yellow roses,
How their st…
To Infinity
She jogs the empty corner of the shopping center lot, where barberries catch the dead leaves.
The wind fills her Buzz Lightyear coat, thrashing and dingy at the elbow.
The bus hulks against the wind. She stops and eyebrows my truck
when I wave her across. She grins like the boy in the s…
Rose Colored Glasses
I thought I was lucky impervious but salt eats away at everything eventually and
the sandstone bluffs collapse and twenty-nine is a landslide after heavy rain
a total loss the cliff
can’t rebuild but it can erode into something new like the sand I am breaking
away from the rock I w…
Jacob’s Angel
To write poetry is to keep watch over your dwelling in a dark forest:
It isn’t often that some creature catches your eye — most nights pass without as much as a rustling in the trees. But when it does, it grabs you, wrestles you to the ground, and demands something of you. Sometimes a few pen…
Make Things Whole
Snowfall’s white descent is piling up, uninterrupted, in layers of soft milk-chalk, as if this is its burdensome intent, to lay rule over a silenced city.
Snowflake: not the modern fragile sense, but as perfect crystallization, the sum of every shade of color, each one as wholly uni…
Neighbor
When the next-door neighbor Molotov cocktailed our house just after a midnight in June, all four of us were asleep, we who’d moved back home to the Pacific Northwest after two decades of lake effect snow, thanks to those bodies of water known as the greats. Their delivery, similar to his, droppe…
As small children, we played war
Wooden bow, arrows, and a gun, the knife is near a belt. Once, our childhood was full of fun.
We ran through the fields with the village neighbors, taking a sword, a painted shield without adult worries and labor.
Time has passed, harsh life befell our fate. Russian missile strikes rain do…
Sunday Morning Coming Down
Church bells beat my alarm to my ears And there ain’t no going back down.
In the fridge there is a carton of orange juice and a can of beer, a gander at the calendar confirms Busch is today’s breakfast
snatch a flannel from the floor Pull up some breeches from the hamper
A hat’s thrown …
Infinity
there is another person that figures the sandwich will be tough to bite into and the road will feel much shorter on the way back. grief is a shoe, unlaced. all rocks look alike, but you are special. this person knows that the long trench coat was made for you. they adore the fit. they see it lik…
Perpetuity
Noun
the state or quality of lasting forever I wish I remembered the last time I rode in your car. I do remember other rides. Climbing into the cramped backseat of the ‘96 Sentra—always behind the passenger’s seat, never the driver’s—ingrained in me to always buckle up first. The resounding c…
I75 Downtown, Cincinnati
Property boundaries overlaid with satellite imagery. Data Source: CAGIS (Cincinnati Area Geographic Information System) 2022
A bundle of highway ramps snake and weave like veins cut through the graded dirt. Three city blocks, measured by the platt maps that outline a history of property lines…
