At first, immunizations & cherry lollipops. Scales, stethoscopes, Disposable bedding. Formica & triage rooms. The delayed ache Of epidurals & birth. Latex gloves. Barium. The occasional mistaken Stone &…

  The first time I met my new family I lit a match in the bathroom. I wanted to make a flame. It was an accident. Downstairs the strangers ate…

  Buoyant on hummingbird wings; Julien guides the eye of the drone. From afar, the top of the lighthouse looks like a lunar module— fire on re-entry, glass cracked and…

  Big old heron fishes midstream, wading as through a time slower than the Susquehanna’s hours upon years upon stone, so when he flies I almost panic after all this…

In the dream or half-dream half waking I was filling a book with writing about a child’s survival, and longing. As I kept writing the book grew thicker. What were…

  In late summer. The hunger of bears. Its logic. Its shifting mouth. Its swift stripping. And prodigious energy.   She looks up as if to say, I will not…

  —with thanks to Geoff Notkin   —a piece of it, lunar rock, gingerly, as directed. I gave him the moon, or as we call it, mah, the H heard…

    You were my Persephone until you abducted yourself. From me. Gone (    ) Where? Why? How? Who are you? My body echoes with your absence, with once-and-lost inflections.…

  Summer burned easily. And everyone had something to say. The rock said, be finished with sweetness. The tree said, repeat like a lie. The ground said, a mouse is…

When my evangelical cousin texts You must never have witnessed a miracle my mind goes to Doug punting the basketball. We were ten. He kicked it a good thirty yards,…

  Hair chopped short as it will get. The risen boy practices forgetting as the pilgrim does. He is a vocabulary of starlings and salt.    

                                                after Sally Mann                          —silk and honey the hair is after so much rain // but not the skin // the skin is coral // leaf-torn & bee-pitted // humped…