Little Creatures
The teacher who looked ancientto her circle of first gradersleaned forward and explained
that the typical lightning bugwas simply the twinklein an angel’s eye,...
Inner Compass
Golden shovel from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness”“…anyone or anything that does not bring you alive it too small for you.”
It could rain...
DetoxIn the morning her long hair drapes like black tears over her shoulders,her Hispanic bones bruised with alcohol and sorrowso that when she says...
Middle Path, Kenyon College
I didn’t know which ones werenasturtiums until after the warmSeptember afternoon I spottedtheir round leaves with orange and yellowflowers on the...
Which is to say, I miss you
Today everyone looks familiarunder the yellow ocher, autumn light.
This woman with the child.That older man resting on a...
Winter Dream
Time ravishes the line, with glare of colorYou fashion a sky, scarring silenceMoon hoards the light
Scars of strangeLines fashioned into a druma sky...
After the Ambulance
Why can’t we break the tensionlike how your motherbroke that Waterford your father gave heron their thirty-fifth anniversary,the day her body first...
French Resistance, without any French
The raccoons lived in the back shedlike a family of nocturnal lawn mowers.The backyard just the front yardthat no one...
Winter Solstice
We drive in the darkpast the open fieldsinto the neighborhood:Millions of lights on the housesin the trees—the world a-twinkle with hopewhile overhead a...
Street Scene
Early evening heat rises frompavements, from cement and asphalt,carrying a scent slightly sour,slightly acrid—oily and tar-like.
Outside the café, beyond its fenced-intables, a large...
