Route 3

poetry
  Spoke the Illinois: take the high road to Pere Marquette, where you bought me an enamelware mug commemorating the event– and Grafton, the underwater town: shops by the water,…

Memorial Day

poetry
  I was a patriot when I drank. Hours at the bar primed me to storm the beachfronts, throw bottles into intersections, lay siege to frozen food aisles. I wanted…

Cemetery Craft

poetry
  There is a sphere defined-- not by the city's finite fencing that holds the dead in (as if mixing the traffic on macadam with the bone trust underfoot would…

Elegies Written on Water by Children

poetry
  For Kathi Aguero   They crouch on the shore of the old summer's evening: Deirdre, Elizabeth, Jack. They have not yet learned to read, soon enough for that. Tonight…

Working from Home

poetry
  I was lying in a bed recovering from chemo in a small spare room and the spare room was spinning and I was dirty to myself but also to…

Like

poetry
  I liked being wheeled around like an invalid, forgetting I could walk. I liked slipping into trance as I entered an imaging tube, rows of diagnostic actions lined up…

Modern Urban Planning

poetry
  The construction site’s all mud & suffering. March wind bends the barren sapling spines, & the laughter of three students walking toward spring break lifts & vanishes, as if…

Mirror to Mirror

poetry
  “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears…” –Donne   Of that declension through self-similars I'm thinking, of galaxies spiraling in the whorls of her fingers, lighting the…

Pequod

poetry
  You should go out, you should go out because if you stay in you’ll write another suicide poem, another little plea bargain to a judge who isn’t there, isn’t…

Tricks of Light

poetry
  You would think the robin hammering my windows relentlessly, days on end, would give himself a break. Yet, again and again, he attacks his image, marking the glass with…

Let Me Knot

poetry
    [hcolumns] [columnhelper span6] To the mirage of two mines, admit imp-demons. Love is not, love. That alters when it altercation finds. Ore bends with the remover. To remove, anneal.…