I. At some point, it became irrelevant to teach little boys how to tie a horse’s harness to a tree after a morning ride as it will become irrelevant, yet possibly charming to tell analog time, and write in cursive, and develop 35 mm film (these things yet in my lifetime). There was, there will … More In Dreaming Stray
Either it comes to you Or you go to it; nevertheless You meet. Highway 139 weaves southward after your day of skiing; a newly teenaged girl watches a screen in the back, playing a movie meant for her younger self – the older brother left behind at the friends’ cabin, the eldest sister in a … More Drifting
Maybe he’s driving the Jeep through the Vietnamese jungle strewn with tents and men trying to dry their socks and men trying to get the cigarette to light and men trying to tune in the radio signal and men trying to find the words to write a letter and trying most of all not to … More Inheritance
And shining in the green field As though they are just-painted models In someone’s miniature world, Set just So as We fly down 577 while Sun and rain leapfrog over each other, Empty houses, fallow fields, A woman pulling weeds In a rectangular patch Reclaimed from the wild, Destined for the wild In 40 years … More Black Horses Wet
I am drunk on this new summer twilight, the world’s wash is golden-hued burdens liberally poured, and so I will roll in the fields where the corn is laid out in straight, sober lines, the light Creeping between them like water rising slow – I will lick the tree trunks and the underside of leaves … More One For the Road
i. Porterfield Elementary jutted like a brick mole on the inside bicep of Highway E, just down from where Roberta’s dad sold tractors to the flannelled German, Norwegian, and Polish farmers digging up the rocky soil around us. Here I would learn subtraction from zero, borrowing a ten from the neighbor number like … More Subtext
There is a man built like a hay bale in the row in front of me, a blue flannel shirt, he comes in alone, jams his long legs behind the seat in front of him, and much like a bale of hay, he speaks to no one but stays hours and hours to have … More At the Nick Offerman Book Reading Event In Milwaukee
The year before the plane finally nosed into the frigid winter sky Was the slow grating scrape of a wooden match along the cold cement, Until I burst into a bright circle of flame; all else recedes in the Haitian heat; Tiny stuttering flames of Kreyol a flicking tongue against the landscape; (rutted and rock-strewn … More Match Girl
I. What happens To the bicycles in Munich; The ones punctuating the cobblestone paths – Locked to the bike racks, lampposts, street signs In sun, rain, sleet, snow, heat Wheels bent into parentheses, Or missing entirely, Or outwardly fine, Frames rusted, scratched, or gleaming, Just Forgotten about entirely locked up and misremembered rented and abandoned … More Fine Ruin (Bicycles in Munich)
This poet pinned behind his ’63 Smith Corona at the art fair; he tilts his hat and waits for you To come, to ask him to free this poem not yet written, the one now held hostage inchoate in the fractal web of ether- He’ll lure it onto the page with whispers and worn keys … More Catch and Release
Halfway North 