Will You Line Up the Children?
For pigtails, balance beams, cracks to break your mother’s back. Everything, lines.
I wrote loops, not over and over but forward and forward and
my line...
An Odyssey
Day like rain, a cast iron crow
Furling its wings in thin emptiness
My heavy body holds the wound
Deep inside black iron cloud
Raining down when the...
The New Math
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...
Aubade
King of neither plant nor animal
but of mornings after
rain / / ghost sprung in the gloaming
a memory of betweenness / /
arisen in the dark
and...
Your Fire and Thunder
Dr. Li Wenliang, who was the first to sound the alarm on the outbreak of the pandemic, died in Wuhan a year ago, on...
Mise en Place
Could this be madness, this? ~Sylvia Plath
Beyond all dusky upstairs rooms,
their doors fastened tight, locked by skeleton
keys I’ve lost in some drawer
of the mind,...
Appliances
On Tuesday the latch knob hurtles off the toaster,
startles me, small silver bullet of the morning.
On Wednesday, pressing down the lever,
I flinch and take...
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...
A Can of Pinto Beans
Robbie Gamble:
For the past several summers I have spent time on the Arizona/Mexico border, working with an organization that provides medical and...
Hart Island
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...
In Summer
He uses your full first name
right from the start, and you let him
because neither of you intends to stay:
he'll go home and so will...