I’ve been thinking about the space a body needs / to move in, how it’s getting harder to tell / who owns property in my brain / versus who is just renting.
My ship is rough as a body, my body / a ship. Even pigs in space are wrapped / in purple and lace, eager to explode / inside the invisible sky of women’s work. / But when it’s time to play the …
We burn love wherever we find it, / smother darkness from the hungry stage. / Our wonder is a shadow; our slumber, a bear— / Ursa’s Minor chord without her Major lift. / Yes, I know!...
This morning I am hopelessly optimistic / that I can fix everything I have ever written, / including this. By noon, you’ll find me / weeping inconsolably, up to my elbows / in wires and blood...
the dart of fish faint at our ankles, each shuttered BBQ shack a kudzu flash / in my side mirror. Pleasure has become the itch / of a mosquito bite between / my shoulders, and your rough thumb on …
spend nearly all day with / their necks down, / lips moving an inch above the ground as if / they are whispering to grass. / Even in the rain, with its soft drone, when their / coats darken to a …
I have a heart as wide as the Mississippi Delta. All sorts / of things grow there: cotton, peanuts, / pigweed. Sometimes I have to fly through / with a big spray of Roundup just to get rid of it all. …
I forgot the prairie because it stood so / still. I forgot the clouds because they / were always moving. I forgot / the taste of water because it lay quietly inside the / taste of everything. / I …
Here and now, this blue winter sky, / and outside a light / frost, / the windows of the houses / and the windows of the cars / I walk out on the porch, and my glasses / fog up / I start my car to …
Since I have cultivated a dislike for football / for as long as I can remember, never playing / or watching, and since I can make nothing / of the nomenclature of X’s and O’s my coach / friend …
Waiting at a jitney stop, these boys / in school uniform. Today’s history lesson / told of voyagers on a ship whose mainsail blessed / the New World with a painted cross. / A Carib elder greeted …
Toes numb in the brackish waters but no great waning : / The rooms were gabardine, were doily. Each a different monogram : / When the men are afraid they are men. Yesterday is tall : No sailors sank …
Ragtime wounds, my friends, ragtime wounds : / The balloon man hoists a mosaic emotion : / Tell us the one about the sinking island—point to the very spot : / Summer peaches we said, as if there …
Bees bumble, cumulus ensues, and that’s the new precision : / They hailed for love, an October grammar, the linking orchard : / The opposite of agency is weathervane : / Show us again, the …
Marooned! With only this shred of wind-tangled orange / polypropylene, the frosty dented rim / of an aluminum pot, and a hank of acrylic fur / to knot around my aching throat. The icicles of my flag …
It hasn’t rained in 6 weeks & my jaw is so tight, it clicks / like my mother’s heels in the early morning kitchen every / time I try to talk. Indy & summertime’s disreputable shimmer / of salt …
We ran Carriage House East / nonstop like a bunch of hungry mouths— / in jacking-jawing & ravenous orbits— / & the huffing in the throat stack / & double-ply knee cracks as we slid / Toughskin …
The pines drop a cone or two into the pool. / They’re throwing buoys / to the woman I see facedown in the freezing / bottomless water. / The night’s fog-tangle thickens with iron, listening. / No …
Under the moon wrapped in gauze, / with one white bird out in the marsh hay / stalking shimmers beneath the water, / my little brother and I are filling beach buckets / with junk from the salt mud: …
When we were children, / my brother used to offer his soul to Satan / to win at board games. He won / because he rigged each board, stacked / each deck, only pleaded to make us think / he was …