Dooryard

poetry
  Blue jay screams in the almost wilderness— she Wants she Wants she Wants.   Nothing but flames will grow in this wind.   Back and forth the blind mice…

Bluebird

poetry
  For months I carried a bluebird. Its breath, dark berries. Its eyes were pebbles. In my pocket, its wings fluttered from time to time. Summer was not enough to sustain…

Emblem

poetry
  [T]hey are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.” - Virginia Woolf, “Craftsmanship”   It really is, your suspicion notwithstanding, always like…

The Room Behind My Eyes

poetry
  I’m drinking coffee with Melissa, telling her about an idea for a poem called The Encyclopedia of Small but Significant Gestures,   in which I explore the gesture of…

Questions for My Tribe in Midlife

poetry
  Was it a cloud or a pillar of fire that led you lost people through the desert?   And were you lost, or merely uncertain as I feel nearly…

Hello Kinshasa

poetry
  You must think that I forgot or are neglecting you, which is not at all true,   you are often in my thoughts. How to write you. Polycentric. Brazzaville…

Slip

poetry
  Some say I no longer wear one, dismissing the slip—and here, we’re not talking panniers, dimity pockets, or pantalets with open crotches but   see:  chemise—so mid-twentieth- century that…

Patria Potestas

poetry
  You are the elbow. You, bone to a point, a rule for movement, marble-   hard and you are palms to pull and pound our only rooms, to palm…

To Yorick, in the Garden

poetry
  Shear back the thorns, the thistles, the body   of rosebushes growing along the fence line. Summer will not give   and the dog is digging up rows of…

Elegy of Color

poetry
    Green shutters—white house.   Paper whites in the weak western light.   Brown mouse and its brown hush   across the stairs, four daughters   brushing long brown…