Category: Poetry

I select a dented copper kettle, a silver fork …………..scrolled with acanthus leaves to add ……………………….to the anarchy in my cupboards. This cream pitcher etched with trailing vines, …………..inscribed Mark and  Janine, 1991, could ……………………….hold miniature roses. On a rack I sift through a jumble of silk dresses, …………..threads secreted by caterpillars who ……………………….gnawed mulberry leaves,…

A garden wheelbarrow fills with rain, worms escape their drowned burrows, a toad squats on flagstones, expelled ……………from its leaf shelter. Inside her house, I clean every room, scrub bathrooms gleaming white, while rain traces patterns on windows, ……………focuses the light. Goldenrod sways outside the nursing home under gold-leafed trees. I sort her clothes, sweaters…

You see them at Starbucks scrambling below patio tables searching for pastry crumbs. These are the Brewer’s blackbirds, the English sparrows, the common grackles—disenfranchised souls bereft of countryside and village green. Some limp on deformed feet; others hobble on one leg, victims of urban treacheries. I watch as a Brewer’s blackbird struggles beneath my table;…

I have space in my heart for two trees, uncoiling. They look as though they’ve been twisted in summer, in peace. In mourning and defiance. I see them in the Saturdays we spent breathing out flies, sucking sand into our throats. The air smelled of honeysuckle and weeds and I found myself looking up to…

I want to come back right into this one, pick up right here when all of us are home, and most of us are okay—maybe not ecstatic but who can be that all of the time and wouldn’t it be enough, coming back, to just be okay? Is there a place I can guarantee this…

appears in the attic—suited, unshaven— and waits until I’ve finished hand-sanding floors (original 1890 pine, stained, lacquered), waits until the room is ready to reveal himself. Bed made, blanket chest heaving our wedding quilt, reading lamp, extra pillows for the new guest room, which Mark Twain claims, his face now in the oval mirror neither…

For an hour after learning of his own father’s death, my father stood by the phone looking out at the empty yard. I was ten years old and had never seen him act this way. I’ve realized since that I had always seen him focused on a task— carrying fresh cucumbers out to my sister,…

the mathematics of suspension occurs in resurfacing, piecing together the pieces, the wood of the tree, sleeping through November’s extra hour, the Scorpio moon, mind lathered in soap and the unholy trinity: snakebite, basil, fallen leaves, the end of the equation a question mark. the theory of regeneration occurs beneath the surface a clockface with…