In Sickness and In Health

  Image: "Relaxing" by Chris, licensed under CC 2.0. Mary Buchinger: “how readily I assign holy” is part of a series of poems I’ve...

Went to the meditation but only the snowed-in cardinals heard me. Far from any port, we’re weighted by anchors made of phantoms. A few minutes of...

look, proof from satellites: mass graves on Hart Island, an old plot of land I never knew existed & never thought to visit. the unnamed & unclaimed, the...

(they) don’t want    mass panicsnakes for your ankles snakes for your (body)                  everyone maybe gets their own (air pumps a...

March 2020 My daughter pots plants in the desert. In the desert, pandemic is elsewhere. Or that’s the theorem. If the proof is in percentages, I tell her to...

Dr. Li Wenliang, who was the first to sound the alarm on the outbreak of the pandemic, died in Wuhan a year ago, on...

This morning’s news comes as relentlessly as it has for weeks, and today I watch as Hasidic Jews bury their dead by the hundreds in Brooklyn, rabbis sitting...

The fluorescent light seems to struggle against death. Not dead yet, the fixture pulses every few or several seconds bequeathing humility to the shadows. The light is beacon-like...

“Tag, you’re it,” cancer says and you fall down the hole, you or someone you love. Your father, a friend from work, the wife of the youth...

I demand a day without so much fucking sky. Or, so much brown earth, flattened as though rolled and pinned by the muted white firmament. I loved it...

The coyote has long since gone but the old pit bull still barks at the edge of the chain link fence for hours without pause. I lie in...

The family is the chosen unit of measurement for so many things. During the pandemic, we were instructed to shelter in place, and this...