As a kid I’d lean against the right wall of my room and with a pencil draw a horizontal line that revealed my height alongside the passage of time:…

  —after Sylvia Plath* here what you see is the intent to express the frame once concealed with ornament once unimaginable here flowers made as if cut by machine, as…

  My son asked me how can she keep a baby from her parents like that I think about her the witch as I cut off most of my hair…

  My mother carried an old man on her back after she fled Vietnam. He was small and shriveled, like a mummy, limbs broken and reassembled into a folded child.…

  Everyone said it was the largest tree they had ever seen on a street in New York. Some said anywhere. The city sent a small crane, then its bigger…

  stopping with their chimera cameras departed currencies they want to see where the Bedouin coin necklaces are thread where the Druze cross-stitch their dinner mats devourer of spiders but…

  from your opening will come an era of inconsequence an adage without donkey or kettle to prepare the glacial faces for their wanderings in a place where the ants…

  If you knew anything about deserts, you knew there were scorpions. So when one appeared in your yard, standing where the crosshatched patches of grass met the beginning of…

  Weed-scrabble, cropping for the hungry earth, this wet morning, young robin clutching at old ivy, berrying the fruits of autumn’s windfall. In the cemetery, apples. I am out of…

  Shallow, uneven, breath of an infant. The eyes are rock pools at low tide. Bones in the face are the face. No life, no expression. Not sleep, not illness,…

  —after Johannes August Nahl’s “The Tomb of Madame Langhans” Bury a woman with her stillborn, the baby crawls out fingers first as the child of Maria Magdelena Langhans: Cherubic…

  Strung out on a bench, I’ve worn light from a streetlamp, golden as an art halo or any manufactured light. I’ve pissed that gold into a sink at work,…