We are anchored in the stars —Larry Dossey, MD   Before I could grab nitrile gloves & drop the body in the garbage can a black triangle dive-bombed  …

  —after Frost   If it were five years ago I was dying, who would it have been who cared? That one boy I could count on to board the…

  idol adorned with eyelashes, fingernails, other half-alive things. teeth & psalm, bitten and bless, so much bone. a song, a jewel, to divine like omen — how to begin…

  Part of childhood remains buried under sandcastles. You used to poach grasshoppers with an old hairnet until it caught strands of cobwebs and would not let go. Memories are…

  One at the end of the fence line was all rot, And more rot, the ghostly maps of leaves. Another, clogged like a drain, came up in gobs, In…

  —after Howard Moss's "Tropical Fish"   Prism smears of runoff through elastic rainbow sand, And nurdle beaches dish into a bin of brilliant bay, Translucent puffs, and bobbing box…

  Your cousins, a few friends line up in the pew. Your brother— absent. He stole from you, lied that you locked your cupboards to starve him, tried to con…

  The lamp that flickered, your keyring, my daughter’s childish portrait, a watercolor rose.   I listed aloud the room’s familiar items like a ship’s manifest   to soothe you,…

  You brought rifles, knives, katana, bow and arrows to the house, as if still hunkered down in your Brooklyn apartment, still pommeled by friendly fire, your mother’s drinking. Like…

  The morning glories I saw less than a month ago can’t be flowering now, more snow than expected yesterday,   and several nights of heavy frost the past few…

  We were kids in school together, though not friends or playmates, just in the same class, and now, decades later, he jacks deer, travels the roads in his pickup…

  a box of frogs arrived one day at our front door, special delivery? My dad had ordered them. Laboratory frogs, he called them. Said they were ours; we could…