* —after “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now”  by Matthew Olzmann * Though the bees are dead, we still have flies. They’re good pollinators. They keep what manages…

  I throw off my ozone like a thong after a long day. Clouds part like pursed lips deflating in defeat as I spread-eagle on my pastoral couch, straddle the…

  after Eric Baus I was saying lily pads float without roots and my son notes I’m explaining things I don’t know he laughs and I sense a tug like…

  the most popular of miniature daffodils   I’ve waited— seen others brighten   neighbor’s yards—south-facing beds,   low elevation—who knows what makes some hardier   early on. There’s nothing…

  somedays poets read about birds while I cut out a sewing pattern the fabric should be washed before it is cut poets say thank you thank you thank you…

  Standing on the platform in Albury, thinking about dead carnations and chipped porcelain, thinking about gelid lakes and the ten years between us, diametrical distance, my mother lamenting her…

  after “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente   I was a house once      very large       empty rooms aching like teeth I knew what a house knows  …

  Light dissolves on the outskirts of town where the trees are mostly their arms, devoid of reason in a strange dream. What hides in itself in the desert? I…

  There is a clay house strange in a desert but no windows, no doors, people are gone no sound except bullets cracking past my ear, and then I wake…

  the neighbors build on the brink of forest, in a few months, the house could be done or gone. watch from the field as they pour foundation concrete, then…

  after Eric Baus   I was saying lily pads float without roots   and my son notes  I’m explaining things I don’t know  he laughs and I sense ++++a…

  Having settled I had to be down with the man who taught me   to understand the geologic scale of things. The man   who made me— see that?…