Hammurabi loved flowers and strewed his bridal bed with rose petals, blood red. Nero loved the fuchsia for attracting hummingbirds and their delectable tongues. Louis XIV sent Madame de…

      "All actual life is encounter." Martin Buber   The cows look slowly up, flick flies with their tails, with their ears, the whole of their flanks twitching…

  His hand sunk in me like a sunset. I lay on my back and listened the night to black. My skin smelled deciduous. I breathed petals in the silence.…

  Dark Lake isn’t bad—necessarily. Dark Lake is the mouth of a cave. A dark pupil in everyone’s eyes. The lost dog opens his soul. Dark spills out on the…

  Think of what the Water takes when it is stirred, or what blocks it grinds to paste no matter early edge or gloss. Yet were his body stone enough…

  When Daniel is dreaming don’t wake him. What he sees will escape time: feather and horn, hunger, what angels do when God points a finger: Pluck men from a…

  It’s not true you know, it said that he doesn’t care for you. I know, it said, that sometimes he turns away when you are most amourous but you…

  If it’s not the roof leaking, it’s the basement flooding, and if you’re lucky, if it’s raining hard enough, it’s both. Another mostly empty paint-can abandoned to the damp…

  No one else could make it the same. Maybe the whipped milk cream was never fluffed to that cumulus, or maybe the ten pinches of sugar weren’t sifted to…

  Kuya said to coffin Goldie in an empty cigarette pack, or say some words and flush him down the drain, but his sleek belly was a wink in the…

  Five girls vow to gather here around this fire every year. Five girls giggle in the firelight. The wind flicks a switch of smoke first to one face, then…

  Fee, Fi, Fo, They chirp the dirge into her bones. Cold peppers, pressed against the lettuce. Okra, bean stalk, she is at it again. Keeps pert with work. Packs…