for Wanda Coleman   If you break enough lines, eventually you have something that’ll kindle & catch like a tar paper shack or a wedding dress. A long gone…

  All’s rooted here in forgiveness— forgiver and forgiven deep   in the textured present. Pleasure rises from the dappled surface,   where, in the chaos of patterns, a woman…

  Flap from your sea grass shelter, hiss at the dog who flushes you out lumber lopsided a zigzag track like a bride dragging her heavy train. Your fractured wing…

  Have you heard the one about the nun and the penguin in the bathtub and the nun drops the soap and says to the penguin, Do you think you…

  Today I try to touch you through your voice now chattled to the answering machine and answering to our password TRICK which fails to trick you to emerge—-merely bypasses…

  He pecks me awake before the hills have rolled out their green tongues. This is why I love the woodpecker best of all the birds in our double-woods. (It…

  Woman comforting an injured dog, the caption the morning after the tornado says, but if you click for the bigger picture, the text changes to woman comforting an injured…

  I need a flashlight to find the flashlight, but make do without, feeling my way down the basement stairs, brailling my hands along the packed shelves where we keep…

  We say that: still life, the way we say stay to the dog already gone.

  Uncrook their white elbows for ten wild minutes to point with abandon as if they were choosing a chocolate assortment.   Designate which of the fleurs de lis inscribing…

  I had touched the weeping birch in the cemetery so many times that there was a small mark, a grease mark or worn place where my hand had rested,…

  and she is a child, cradling an old horseshoe no one will miss. A small black pony stamps its feet. Smoke sways on the ceiling. Come closer, he says.…