I get it. There is nothing inherently creepy about an empty swing swinging on an abandoned playground. But the ghost pushing it is a problem. You remind of my…

  The quiet page is drenched but the snow keeps filling it up your fountain pen loops are the tangles you couldn’t comb out of your daughter’s hair when you…

  —after Zhang Zao   A letter opens and time turns back a letter opens and a wound appears a letter opens with an apology and closes with an exclamation…

  you were born between having & not having: in a cream-tone house   with orange trimming, bombs hang on either side of your country   like parentheses. there are…

  Standing and staring out into the murky spaces of night where the bushes lose themselves to obscurity, a scintillation occurs, a happenstance, a brief blinking, off/on, as in: non-being/being.…

  which in this country means just gone two, a speckled black and white cat creeping under a hedge, the sun an orange foil over high rooftops, lawn damp and…

  I am the parasol through which she enters this world and if I were to rid myself   of her, pull her from me like a layer of skin,…

  Bells. Then silence and trembling. Touching a photograph, I count the dead. The furnace rumbles.   Candles flare. There’s no card from my mother to stand with the others…

  I make supplications to the birds whose feathers were blades, lost in war. birds whose bones could no longer be found in the museum, because they flew over the…

  the day an airplane crashed, the air became heavy with the aura of mouths sore with grieving songs. I was taught to plead with the fire in my broken…

  —for M.F.O.   Sent to the front, all around me                       crack & steel fire, shouting voices— I feared no death, only sat down bullets buzzing hornets past head—            And…

  First, the remains of foil balloons littering the bank of the pond, a string once tied to a child’s wrist. Then, a pilot in uniform,   perhaps on leave,…