Poetry
chamelier
My proof of choice was moonshine / a fermented sugar that could parch every last hydrogen / pearl from the sky. / Lost to fire spirits, memory is porous, / earthenware, /...
as a child
Poppa’s trinkets shudder / and rattle against the window-shelf pane / whenever one of the grans primes the pump outside: / an Alaskan fishnet float of glass, the old-fashioned / spun sugar...
Where you came from
I made a crude vessel, a trough my sweetheart. / Shiny pigs, the knives went rooting in the muck of me. / Thorax divided neatly, they nudged aside intestines braided thick, /...
Contest Winner
Road Conditions
january weather is agitated daily along / the four-oh-one. each nimbus vessel / pausing to think before sloughing / ice, rain, snow, hail. / this is one nervous system. / /...
Contest Winner
Dear Elizabeth
Your letters have kept me company for weeks / but now I feel the wrench of parting, the book / about to end, and so I read more slowly, put / it...
Contest Winner
This is for Richardson’s Ground Squirrel
flickertail, picketpen, tawny burrowing pest / of the short grass prairie, crippler of horse & rider, / cattle bison ox; tractor disabler, axle wheel breaker, / you warrant a pardon, you &...
bad taste
I would like to have dinner with the man who treated me wrong. / The one who, when I laughed open-mouthed at something he said, remarked: / My, but you have more...
in tongue
That day we argued, I said I was talking about you—I was talking 80 percent metaphor, 20 percent you. I was talking 80 per cent metaphor as if my tongue was a...
letter to a broken dove
Our linen closet is full / of wingless birds. / / What you call a cloud, I call desperation. / / Put away the thesaurus— / failure, death, defeat /...