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…

  There is a sphere defined-- not by the city's finite fencing that holds the dead in (as if mixing the traffic on macadam with the bone trust underfoot would…

  For Kathi Aguero   They crouch on the shore of the old summer's evening: Deirdre, Elizabeth, Jack. They have not yet learned to read, soon enough for that. Tonight…

  I was lying in a bed recovering from chemo in a small spare room and the spare room was spinning and I was dirty to myself but also to…

  I liked being wheeled around like an invalid, forgetting I could walk. I liked slipping into trance as I entered an imaging tube, rows of diagnostic actions lined up…

  The construction site’s all mud & suffering. March wind bends the barren sapling spines, & the laughter of three students walking toward spring break lifts & vanishes, as if…

  “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears…” –Donne   Of that declension through self-similars I'm thinking, of galaxies spiraling in the whorls of her fingers, lighting the…

  You should go out, you should go out because if you stay in you’ll write another suicide poem, another little plea bargain to a judge who isn’t there, isn’t…

  You would think the robin hammering my windows relentlessly, days on end, would give himself a break. Yet, again and again, he attacks his image, marking the glass with…