How we love: by taking another name into our mouth and swallowing it   for safekeeping. By softening at a touch the way dusk dissolves the city,   bodies…

  You know the story He became the rain Then a roaring fire Face impassive Flames licking warm & thick & ferocious The furl of his shirt in hot air…

  is a convenience: we say fish don’t feel it. catch   a trout by its lip & leave a hook there, boil   a lobster alive & think steam,…

  two crows have landed on the roof of the applebee’s, so it must be   halloween. for crows are the spookiest bird & applebee’s is the spookiest place  …

  I used to have this job that was just an angle.   What was required of me was to not be toward it, not tilt my body in a…

  Having deep-cleaned the home of the reigning brand ambassador for a haute line of children’s books, I’d had enough of all those stories. Kids spinning back through history to…

  from Nora right before I left for work at Apollo, our college town’s carpet cleaning service. Twelve-hour days in the Midwest drought summer of 1988, sucking up dirt from…

  —for Joey   Who knew we’d scramble out the rip of the ocean of home?   Your flailing limbs proving first is the worst. Who knew we’d subsist  …

  In my body it had grown, and then it slopped into a trough as the midwife heaved   like bringing in a dory. I barely felt it pass, workhorse…

  We are anchored in the stars —Larry Dossey, MD   Before I could grab nitrile gloves & drop the body in the garbage can a black triangle dive-bombed  …

  —after Frost   If it were five years ago I was dying, who would it have been who cared? That one boy I could count on to board the…

  idol adorned with eyelashes, fingernails, other half-alive things. teeth & psalm, bitten and bless, so much bone. a song, a jewel, to divine like omen — how to begin…