The Red
The red of the port
scar near her heart
of the Citgo sign’s glow
when I turn to the window
of my eyes from watching her
in the infusion...
Midnight in Quarantine
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...
Holobiont
Holobiont. Agustín Fuentes gave me this new word at the beginning of the New Year, during the On Being podcast with Krista Tippet titled...
The School of Working Women: A Letter to My Mother
Dear Mom,
Greetings from Seattle. It’s going on ten months without seeing you, but I swear I hear and smell you in the pre-lucid hours...
A Murmuration of Stones
A plot. A boneyard. A potter’s field. A necropolis. A golgatha.
I stumbled upon it one steamy day in the first summer of COVID, while...
Wednesday, March
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...
Mosaic
You were embryo #10. You brewed in your petri dish, doubling every day in the low-humming laboratory. I imagined you, exposed under the microscope,...
Thinning to Fable
Inside the house no snow
No wood of footbridges dark with a staying wet
in a forest black with green
and lore with white
But burning hands under...
Leave Me Alone
I return to something like consciousness lying outside the gate in the driveway, partly in the county road. Our big akitas whine and leap...
First a light, then–
“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...
A Light Here, A Shadow There
"A light here required a shadow there."
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
The dream is always the same. He imagines a book lying on a table,...
Here’s How It Will Go
The chest cage and diaphragm, with expansive spirit,
cooperate one last time,
the discomfort at the depth of the intake
a reason to pause, with a sense...