can’t quite hold
trust, surrender, broth on the stove, yesterday’s bones when she was young, eva named the chickens now she only names her dresses—night-elk, goldenrod stable-stained, wild plum, a well-made dress…
Wanting to Sign Furiously But Can’t
When I want to beat up the world with my fists, my forearms boil over with an easy rage. Sometimes I forget to breathe and nearly die. In my…
Dream in Which I Give You My Memories as Dreams
for Frannie, at four months Even in sleep you hunger: purse your lips and bellow your cheeks as though to nurse from the world. Material things, you’ll outgrow,…
Minority Report
White Guy #1 to receive White Guy #2 Named Fellowship for Distinguished Position as Dead White Guy #3 Chair of University Department X. White Guy #1 named recipient…
Maleficent
i. in seventh grade I learned to pray in Spanish is rezar edged like razor, work & worship, I learned adoption was life’s sword: maldición//malediction, bendición//benediction, doubled & edged…
The rectangular dish you brought home from Tokyo
broke clean—one corner snapped away from the blue-black lacquered whole, a long slender triangle like a gymnast in three-quarter split exposing raw bone of ceramic. Your response, a heavy…
Wood and Wool
1. You are wood, you are wool, you are the intricate skeleton of the desiccated leaf, of the dead dehydrated papyrus-bloom 2. you are simple as a scroll…
An Oral History of David Greenspan’s Polly Pockets
A Father Now I’m as liberal as the next man but pink toys? A pale streak all over him. I was drinking draft beer. American as anything. It…
Shelter in Place
The plums rained down on us, then the fireworks. We ordered a package and we took out the trash. We had pulled weeds all season, sprayed aphids, we had…
Elegy for the Polar Bear
The blankness of the animal is profound or, no, a lack of blankness, a total clarity of feature, her color particular and unnamable against the snow whose…