I look up from my grave-- I’m not buried, I’m building on the ground floor. I always intended to find something more than the right button for my coat,…

  For seven years, on four of seven days I walked or biked or rode the subway to her real wood paneling and sat at first then lay so that…

  I came into being unknown to myself, a small sac of seawater and soft bones. Time and memory had no meaning for me. Weightless hunger spidered with blood, I…

  A small space opens inside Tennessee, perennial-ready. At the last moment I manage to stay by the window, looking further. Whose body is that being sent back to ground?…

  (for Seamus Heaney)   With a two-handed grip, plunging the steel wand deep, there and again over there--the root web, he explains, as broad as the dogwood's crown, feeding…

  The Triangle Offense ::: The offense requires wide spacing: Slave ships: Slave ships: 14-hour workday for sewing machine operators: $2 wage a day: Cuts and screens: Garment workers are…

  Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees and vanish. Without you whose love was air-thin and particular, I’m left these daughter-hands of bone that do…

  I sit naked to the first rays of the sun. I'd wrapped myself in fancy clothes--the glitter of discrimination, the weave of intel- lectual dis- tinction, the heavy silk…

  They were tied, this couple, not knotted—strands looped and holding each other together—but even. Not the even that’s caged within revenge, but even like bangs cut straight across a…

  trackless by moonlight, we squeeze through the white pinch of birch, crowning owls with antlers. a flock of ochre follows us to the lake where we pool our toes…

  Spoke the Illinois: take the high road to Pere Marquette, where you bought me an enamelware mug commemorating the event– and Grafton, the underwater town: shops by the water,…

  I was a patriot when I drank. Hours at the bar primed me to storm the beachfronts, throw bottles into intersections, lay siege to frozen food aisles. I wanted…