after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   Travel is travail the shortest trek is turmoil Mother Earth holds us close so low there is nothing we don’t look up…

translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain   A villain can’t be someone concrete. A villain can be a neighbor, but not mine can be a leader, but not yours…

  Alanus ab Insulis insisted the soul Gets fastened to the body “with tiny little nails.” With tiny little Medieval nails The Latin term for their fineness—subtilibus— Attaches itself to…

  I hear the hawk. It will not show itself, the short, high whistle sounds from the trees. If it were punctuation – a dash between this and this. Does…

  I never saw her read another book. Cookbooks. After she turned seventy, she carried the thick book on what to expect when the body began to die to the…

  the shape of a wraith made                              from discards and swatches fabric cuttings pasted down                  …

  It will make good sense when you get there to rise before dawn and take a long look out            after the night has passed. Witness the wet gray…

  Unmoved by my presence, the wasp works one end of her nest to the other. The lintel's shade elides the screen between our dwellings as the cross breeze carries…

  The white roots probed late summer underground, Sought in moist tubers of swelled potatoes A darkness that encouraged them to take Their fill, stretch out, and die. At harvest,…

  Yo, for how your “o” is like the peephole through the front door of my life (and so many others’) framing one face then another a cameo setting for…

  Even when a low ceiling of clouds is forecast for all its hours the day starts throwing light around like chicken feed from under a doorway or comes outside…

  The green blades glow as the low sun slants across lawns. The houses lining the lake hover above what’s ending: the day, the summer, my calculated innocence: nothing has…