Poetry

Morning arrives armatured in glass.The pines stand rigid along the road,each needle sleeved in ice, each branchbearing a brightness too heavy to keep.All night the storm practiced its slowaddition (drop to sheath, sheath to weight)until the forest breaks under pressure.Now the trees begin speaking.A rifle-crack travels the ridge:one tall pine giving way at the shoulder,its…

Limbs jackknifed across blacktop.Empty traffic lights, sagging wireslow enough to burn.Slow crawlthreads the wreckage,looking for the lone dinerwindowed in neon.The smell is the same(pine torn open, wet insulation)as that late Florida summerwhen the eye passed over,clawing the roof open,rain pooling in the outlets.Carpet gutted,two-year-old barefoot on concretetracks chalky dustfrom room to roomwhile we wait for…

The drive out past Denver,turning the dialuntil static softenedinto song.The mountains roseslowly as if they didn’t want to startle us& we took pictures everywhere, proofwe were once looking in the same direction.Pulled over way too often—Blue columbine along the shoulder,Milky Way slungover sand dunes,signs for trailheadswe’d never hike again.That was before the silencebegan sounding like…

This morning, the honey caughtin the jar’s rim glows from within,a cathedral windowrendered in clover and glass.I watch it tremblewhen I reach past,hand not quite steady.No grand lurch,just the quiet rehearsalof what I might becomeby noon.There are days I ama house with all the lights on,radiant, overdrawn.The mirror won’t meet my eyes.Emails bloom like algae,texts…

For weeks, you dug a trench around dead stumps,the crepe myrtle trees in your flower bed,moving the soft earth in buckets,sawing through thicker buttress roots by hand,blistering your palm on a spade,scooping around twisted gnarlssearching for the underneath,the point you could rock the base of the trunkin its hole and roll it away to the…

Imagine how muchwe take into the body Dirt we breathe,insect parts we swallow,hairs in our food,lungs caked with smoke and resin,grief we store in our muscles It’s no wondercells stop dividing,dying off one by one,joints grind down in secret,blood learns silence We carrythe weight of unsaid things,each heartbeata strained apology,each breatha labored remembrance All this…

we were never separateonly misaligned in spin, like particles trained on each otherfrom opposite ends of a question you opened a door & light elongated outward speaking my name in the dialect of atomsyou touch a mirror I bruise your mouth forms regret in my city, the sky breakswhat was said is said again but…

Today, I dust off old prayers, sweep clean the sky and drivethrough a crumbling earth, swallow rivers until the stones achethe way melaleuca soaks up the swamp, beetles steal a host’s skin Where time becomes mastodon limbs blanching in the limitless wind,wind that sounds like an ocean, reciting secrets told to my shadowin confidence, an…

This poem is another womanI read your face, swept in lines you believe will be meant for you: The girl was an ocean of jellies, a spiral of stars left in her wake; galaxies bloom her hidden currentsThe moment hangs weightless, tip-toed off cilia and leviathan bones, storms that split the afternoon sky, rains that…

I.

 The first
          (not your real mother’s
but she took you to raise)
sleeps like ashes in a box,
etching smoothed to a sigh
over years of turning it ’round
holding the stone in her palm
through every Sunday service. 

II.

 Your husband’s,
          cut away in a sterile room
from a swollen, bloodless finger,
a…