At the end of the week we dragged our various brokenness west on highway 29, across the Mississippi river, through the tangled Cities and landed on a Minnesota lake encircled with plenty. Not quite the wilderness but at night you can still see the stars and the light shines in yellow parallellograms on thick green … More How to Carry Your Broken Bones
But lo here is hot coffee and from the corner Nina Simone croons and there is a snowy slope to the silent white river stopped from its babble by a sliver of flat white sky like a shushing finger against chattering lips – This cabin is already stove through with falling pines or burned to … More The Cup is Already Broken
it’s the ritual of the envelope/ of the return address/ of your address/ of the stamp the card I will send to you is a time traveler, you I hold like a tiny beacon for a moment while outside darkness like a stray cat curls around the house and Sheila wrapped in a parka dispenses … More Decembering
Perhaps the news alit for just a second – tiny talons rest on a bough in the lovely dark pines, the branch barely dipping, the chickadee no heavier than your cigar; did you forget it anon, or did the bomb of it drop to the earth leaving its song in the air before you even … More Birds and Strangers
Just past Randall Park in the shadow of the First Congregational Churchmy kid, who is taking me to the Joynt for $1 beersbetween Good Friday and Easter, asks me about the whole Jesus dealand I tell him the 2 block long version,where Jesus comes in on a donkey, adored –but fickle is the crowd and … More The Joynt
These steady lake waves come near like a dog teasing with a stick – roll up to our pedals, retreat, roll, retreat, while we crash with nubby tires down the thin spine of beach, the heaving water to the east a balm, a coolant, a passage, a lifter-up, a dragger-down, a dark and silent grave. … More Interstitial
On my way north, once again, Highway E curves into a 25 mph crawl past a post office and a closed taxidermy shop, toward the county building that was once my elementary school that now holds snowplows. A hawk flies low over the road toward the sun setting nearly in the south – so close … More Bliss
Rising out of the galaxies as though she’s just woken up, mane in a tangle, unsure of what she did the night before – what was in those astral drinks, whose boots are under her bed, what stars will be birthed hence, their light showing up in the lenses long after the humans have exterminated … More Euclid Captures the Horsehead Nebula
black heeled shoes sink in the spring-batter Earth that takes, that tallies, that deducts one more from the zero step; just step around the shallow warren, where five baby bunnies wriggle in the warm black dirt butts up, born and living and dying in this brief aside, this hyphen, inside the sanctuary my friend’s father … More St. Edward and Isadore Church; Exeunt, Pursued by a Bear
Her hands flit about in my mouth, landing tooth upon tooth, sharp beaky instruments scraping and picking tiny morsels – she chirps to me as she works – how her boys shot their BB guns at chickadees; “If you shoot it, you eat it,” she told them, which seems like as good a rule as … More Chickadee Song
Halfway North 