Snake-Jawed Epithalamium

poetry
  Again I watch a cousin           fitted for a wedding gown ++++++lace and strings tightened       across the back, whale elegy written across the spine          Fingers clasped around…

Blood Firsts

poetry
  I bury my bloody underwear in the trash out back where coyotes yip at night. When we talk about the girl who drowned in the reservoir on the edge…

Leaving Graham Ave

poetry
  To begin a new relationship with an old lover, is precisely that; new. How you cannot drink from the same river. Changing ways. Therapy and the co-pay. And so…

Balanced Bite

poetry
  I tell my student surgeons are more likely to be sociopaths, full of themselves enough to make a wound, then declare it healed. A sociopath’s paper bag personality is…

Bless You, Nina Simone

poetry
  for going upside my head with the seared black on both sides sound of your voice that night I got high off you with a mythological kind of white…

Sweet Collusion

poetry
  Together we translate our mornings into coffee and the crossword, each with her own cup, each her own copy, the ritual habitual, afternoons into separate rooms, you pondering interstellar…

Madison Social

poetry
  From the patio of the architect’s favorite bar, you watch the city spiral out—a black net of chain-link fence, three crew cut soccer fields, the gray vein of West…

Ahmet, a chair, his PTSD

poetry
  My friend pronounced, like a man without a past, that the images were real. It was only on certain days, when the light hit the kitchen counter—the flowers, the…

Elegy for the Noise of Touch

poetry
  Even in the memories of the longest-lived whales, the ocean has never been quieter; this virus cuts a silent wake. Deep in their earwax, the dank white of baleen,…

Pop Quiz with Ninth-Inning Sweats

poetry
  When did you last hug your mother? A. Before she spoke and I yelled. The word spun from my mouth +++like a screwball. B. When the stitches of the…

While Hiking with My Son,

poetry
  the boy reminds me that he is not, in fact, my son. Too late now. We’re way into a country road & I’m carrying him against my chest like…