Green shutters—white house.   Paper whites in the weak western light.   Brown mouse and its brown hush   across the stairs, four daughters   brushing long brown…

  I’ve given up many things to the elements: that floor-length red leather trench, my father’s violin. When the storm rolls in, it’s hard to quiet the crew   in…

  As if the extinct thylacine opened its jaws 180 degrees like a book and swallowed Father clean. Those striped haunches glowing in the forest—see   the beast zigzagging with…

  Mrs. Sparrow, your one staring eye is blind to the sky. Flattened like a book, you have an attentive fly,   burnished green and gold, decay’s sleek courtier, who…

  Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone.   I’m at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston.   I came to see the tomb of Increase and Cotton.…

  When my father left us, my mother became a panther, her eyes slow from medication, hunting an answer   the rooms couldn’t give her. She was angry, but didn’t…

  for Tamir Rice   the officer stops   parks his car at the frost chipped curb the officer can see the boy and spends a few more moments in…

  on days when he’d been exiled from home and you had yet to learn to travel the crease of your mother’s brow   you’d sit with your father  …

  I caught the smell of sick on myself, sweet as talcum or skin. My god was exhausted. My god was a glitter. My   mama called sweat a sheen.…

  I went to love because I wanted to believe   in the self as a place that deserved its own destruction. I dwelled on the inside of my  …

  A fine way of looking at things— me observing you kissing me.   How decent of me to pretend I am shocked by you.   You’re the inverted foot…

  Why is it so stubbornly in winter? Drifts everywhere, salt shortage. For the men hawking roses in morning rush, nowhere to stand but the street — they’re gonna get…