Category: Poetry

for Marie Howard Max, I sit on the leather couch, trying to write a short story about traveling through portals disguised as doors, from life to afterlife. A ray of sunshine like a spotlight hits a photo of you on …

To talk about the lake is to talk about what happened: the length of his lie, the sick rocking of the waves into the stillness of a body on the bathroom floor, the murky surface of drowning / blueness of …

my friend Shafina gets up, makes the curry for both her dying parents every day, a rote prayer red curry green curry yellow curry beige curry I imagine her whole kitchen looks like a shrine to Tupperware no matter the …

When James Wright wrote that he’d wasted his he was talking about ego. Rilke, too, considering Apollo, knew the game was light—what you spread once loss’s heft becomes as natural as a wallet’s. Say I’m foolish. But I’m sure of …

Becky’s mom is too religious but at least she lets us go to the park by ourselves—where two older boys with a pocketknife back us up against the wall of the maintenance shed. I can run fast until my asthma …

Past the middle of the forest, right before the fence of pine trees, a woman without any eyelashes lived in a cedar house notched together with hemp. Sundown; I would visit with a cup of peach tea & fresh berries …

Here we are, Palm Sunday just past, inside this metaphor of death and life, of powerful illusions and real power. The calendar says we approach Good Friday, when what is most important dies. Or has the sun already set on …

I know how best not to dream at night. No matter how much I sweep I know the dust remains in the air. I live, necessarily, without a picture of the hole behind my eyes. I speak quietly all the …

Heavy-hearted & auricular, her etymologies spank with gristle the lorgnette sternum of the islander, Carabao. “Ugh,” snorts he, at the uncalled-for jab, his kinetic masculinity undiluted. How pleasingly shaped is this trickster, Melancholia, her acrobatic mammalian periodicity, her mementoes that …