I. The weekend after the spring snowstorm that brought down trees with with wind and weight we are all at the gas station filling up our portable tanks for the generators before we hit the dollar store for candlesticks, bottled water, batteries. The checkout girl tells me “I made my kids go for a run.” … More Elemental
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
I retrieve the already-read newspaper for my dad from my car while we wait for breakfast omelets in the late afternoon, his eyes patched from melanoma scrapes. He looks like he got in a fist-fight. “Thems that die are the lucky ones!” he had said, coming out of surgery, a pirate. “Arrr, arrr, arrr.” The … More Halloween at the Blackstone Diner
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
in this snow-dark wood i by wolves am torn asunder raise your glass to their howl for today i followed after the tracks of an absent otter who soundless belly-slid toward one round black hole on this ice-trimmed river from the fragile edge; there all tracks end, there always one moment perches on the brink … More if tonight
At 100 N. Jefferson St in Green Bay, City Hall: the ladies of democracy all have their backs turned when I walk in for early voting, attending to the copy machine, the phones, the trash, as though it’s an ordinary day with the office in order. Finally one of them, my age, with bangs, takes … More The Ladies of Democracy
In early October along the river’s edge, deer hooves have printed the mud with quotation marks, although they had nothing to report. They drank the cold water in silence and slipped back into the woods. It’s not yet five o’clock but the sun is already stumbling sideways and falling behind the Wisconsin treeline, rays flailing … More Undone
Halfway North 