If you can get past the pictures of men holding fish men in the bathroom mirror men shirtless in bed with their dogs men lifting weights in gyms men with guns men with cheap bottles of beer men with Maga Hats men in their cars men on motorcycles men on barstools men making kissy faces … More The Detritus of Hope and Unopened Scotch
There is a tiny garter snake coiled in a slat on the dock where the flood laid down a tangle of grass; when I pass by it darts up and glides across the boards and falls dramatically, comically, into the reeds. From my paddle board the river is glassine, the setting sun’s reflection a smooth … More While the World Slowly Fragments
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
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
Halfway North 