What Does the State Teach / With My Body

poetry
It is a well, my body,/for the state/to pour their labors into,/my body. Put between bodies/assigned to me/because of my body. The right kind/of man teaching/the right kind/of bodies. What…

Insects Are Dying Off—Alarmingly Fast

poetry
Vox, 2/11/19 I worry. Not the way I worried about the brown recluse of my childhood haunting the garage, the leaf pile, the specter of necrotic creeping sores; or the…

The Phantom

poetry
  One night, when you were still a child, the phantom lunged for your neck. Come morning, it was still hanging on, so you wore its darkness like a cape…

Winter Fix

poetry
  It’s snowing on Jane Street and I wish Schuyler’s boots were kicking out from under his umbrella, or someone else’s boots since Jimmy’s dead and his would be a…

Going Home in the Pandemic

poetry
  I don ’t go back often, but now my mom calls, and already, I can picture the drive: bend in the road, forest hill, the pasture, the creek, and…

The Body Has Deep-Rooted Memory

poetry
  Mine reaches beyond my lifetime, far into the past, my friend Iris tells me. Ancestral, another word for the way sound can sometimes be too much, the roar of…

On the Eighth Anniversary of Surrender

poetry
  Distracted by Earth’s magnetic field, pulled away from their own survival, birds, in their primal journey south, sometimes deviate from the flight path. Even birds stray. And me? I…