The old tom sank his claws and tried to leap from the steel counter, but I held his scruff   and nodded to the vet who murmured, For the…

    I slice the air   on Freak Street   into neat squares   of night smoke:   karma, master, nice legs,   vision breath.     The risen…

  The strangest sleep I slept was not beneath willows                  on twigs and brush              and what…

  They look too busy to retire. Or else some government has cut their pensions and they have no option but to remain industrious, whatever it is that they do,…

  "So much charm, and such a fierce flame," I woke up thinking I'd write on her card after I heard at work that she’d chosen hospice instead of further…

  In this nation born of sacrificial smoke, born of vague bullets into an abstract heart…   By the light of candles I read the history books and the consensus…

  Our Savior’s spine shines incandescent. We walk on each other’s bare heels, follow one another by our sense of light.   We walk through pine and stubble. We walk…

  Impossible to read, held with another bit of wax, like chewing gum A small white calling card full of emptiness         A girl dances in a…

          Joseph Husson 1840, ink & watercolor   At the center is the Ocean of Love Though it’s not a circle – one ragged Peninsula to…

  it began on Timbre Ridge Lake after a concussion of rain it began as apparitions in wisps and runnels don't whimper at the old mine's whistling don't run away…

  Here on the cold examination table, I miss the cradle of my bra. Soon the radiologist will sink a bright needle into my breast.   In the low afternoon…

  I once had a teacher who loved to cross out the first few pages of our stories – even when our stories were only a few pages long. He…