Spring by Botticelli, or Three Women I Can’t Stop Looking At
It’s always the three woman I can’t stop looking at—closed circle, hands entwined, pallid faces absorbed in thought, a small loop of time. As if even amidst nature’s…
Things I Am Saving to Write
for Harry and the snows of Kilimanjaro How airports are cathedrals, each line a pilgrimage. The tilt of an airplane as seen from the last row, its windows…
It’s obvious
When I’ve been crying. My face, a puffy moon. Heart, mean and wounded. My voice, a flat slick of fat on the soup top. Last night I dreamt…
get angry that there is no field
in no field, there can be no horse grazing on no wildrye or wheatgrass, no yarrow teeming with no ladybugs, no bubbling cumulonimbus in no baby-blue sky,…
Intersection
Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. Truth…
Furthermore, There’s No Real Telling What Propelled Us Here
Uber, tornado, romantic aspiration, deep psychological insight, deep horniness, whatever it was; and whatever it was we said to the other seventh-grade boys to get them to pull…
Temptation, Expulsion
A streetlamp scorching the cloth of night, a barbed acanthus on a wrought-iron fence, he was platter of lemons and salted wounds. He could not tend. He seeded soft…
Starting Treatment during Covid
In the hinge between a summer of open-air dining and falling case numbers and the oncoming winter of closed doors and stuffy classrooms, we begin to compromise…
can’t quite hold
trust, surrender, broth on the stove, yesterday’s bones when she was young, eva named the chickens now she only names her dresses—night-elk, goldenrod stable-stained, wild plum, a well-made dress…