When your husband is buried just a few steps away from the house how can you ever leave? When you can open the front door and say “It’s a…

  She slept with the bear to relieve herself of the burden of purity to travel the world alone with only a backpack.   Apple trees lit up with ten…

  —after Aimee Mann   I can still feel the ricochet of myself at sixteen, the windows cracked and gone down the years.   There’s no warning. I was already…

  Here, there is a great big willow that gives its shade in the summer. Wilted little leaves tumble into my lap. I bury the dry bodies of ants. I…

  What does it mean to leave a colony? A penguin is heading toward the mountains, directionless, slow and strange. Pearlwort smashed under heavy snow, he follows the grey light…

  We may not have learned what a verb was but we learned what a noncount noun was. We may have forgotten what a noncount noun was but we learned…

  Our directions said take exit 31 or 33 so we of course took 32 and drove off the map into thin gray roads, slanting drizzle, pairs of Rottweilers guarding…

  In Cambridge, I bought a Passport to the Moon, with a large map from 1679 drawn by Giandomenico Cassini, & issued by the Lunar Ministry of Solar System &…

  The calcified doors open like shells as I open my eyes and remember you The shells of my lungs open with speech in the palindrome of memory   The…

  “Silver seems to dominate in the Carolinian dream, when it is, of all such dreams, the one least likely to be realized.” —Popular Science, 1892   Silver does dominate…

  Prospectors may appraise an entire mountain range and identify only the absence of a single ore.   But if just mica and corundum crumbs are found, if the profits…

  The old men chide each other to tee up quick, before the rain. I want to buy a fountain soda, sit on the porch, and eavesdrop. I want to…