Shadow of a Doubt   Light falling against a solid, upright object casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt. In the morning, standing against the railing   on the balcony of your forest home, the valley...

Snail Funeral   Between tulip and ryegrass there is a freshly dug grave I might be five, or four black soil beneath my fingernails loss in the hollows of my footprints   Its viscous body is buried in a bottle cap coffin offered to the earth under flower beds...

Returning Home, Teachers   Dying swamp trees are irregularly spaced by lynx’s cry answered indifferently well, resigning itself to a natural Providence: self-satisfied. It filled a belly with wild mice several times more vigilant than dying trees, clicking...

Because the moon is moving away   from Earth 1.5 inches each year I know someday this will all be over.   The churning of the tide will soften as her reliable waxing and waning   disappears. Infinite gravity governs absolutely. Each action yields equal...

Vanishing I wish I didn’t cry at creeping vines forming on bungalows, at bus station lost and found receipts and forgotten gloves. At the 60s spirits smoking Pall Malls in my living room on Sundays evenings in February when the heat kicks on. Old dogs and moth-bitten...

thieves and murderers   she gently sacrificed the sparrow eggs under a strawberry moon to a mother and her baby raccoons. just cells in shells, nothing breathing or eating. it had to be hard for her. so soft, her critter loving soul will be haunted until wrens...

Walking Beds Not in any particular direction. But somehow in concert with the other furniture. Me as a boy says to me “Why don’t you stop them?” “The days go by,” I say, praying that this is weighty, meaningful. But I know me as a boy knows that it means as much as...

A J. G. Ballard Kind of Gone  after Patti Smith   The first cool dawn following the unwavering humidity Kentucky summers are known for, a layer of mist containing upwards of a century of morning   dew rises eye level from the farm, like fallen soldiers...

Self-Portrait as Carefully-Written Poem Each line a soft and velvet shelf upon Which every syllable’s a gem. A notch For each to sit in, snug … ten gleaming swans Perched rung-like on the water’s plane. Now watch How, necklace-like, each gem will sound in turn Its...

Ode to T-Pain Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks you took pains to hide your beauty. Auto-tuned a voice that needed no tuning, that sounds clear and honest as winter on the nape of the neck. Often, if not always, we ask angels to play the kazoo. To suffice....

My Body, Your Choice Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light waves toward my flat black pupil a record shuffling the same few songs. Isn’t that what womanness has been about? Repeated scenes: the bonnet-donned bonnie forking at the hay bail the fish wife catching her baby...

Wheels It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude. You, car-seated chanteuse, fresh from Montessori Pre-K, I, your chauffeur grandmother joining you in a ramped-up CD sing along, chanted...

Huck at the altar of drainage culverts twice a day he leans into concrete tunnels that run beneath driveways, trusting in what waits amid wet leaves, grass clippings, the effluent of suburbia - he is a true believer, a witness who recalls a raddled tabby within one...

Exhalations untethered from my daydreams my husband says ¿Que te pasa? ¿Por que tanto suspiro? it’s even a joke now—my fictional characters respond to every line of dialogue with sighs. Like me. We’re illegible, scrawling out the only possible response, knee-deep in...