Matisse said when I paint green it does not mean grass. When I paint blue it does not mean sky. I don’t find this irritating. I wouldn’t mind sitting…

  I assure you that I still love you. It is the truth but it is also threadbare, a warm bowl of soup waiting at our empty table, above the…

  Loving you, child, was running at sea level after training at altitude. Thin air trained my blood to scavenge. I learned flight in reverse: sinking from the mountain top…

 

  So long have I neglected the bottle sweating on the table that it resembles a crime scene, the dead man not yet realizing he is dead. It’s all my…

 

  —a sestina I let the flowers die, the zinnia, the tickseed, the heather go brittle in their pots. Everywhere underfoot the soft cracking of earth. Even the mind grows…

  We’re made of weeds blue as empty homes. I left alone from where the old fires barely burn, slid through the night like the front lawn was a road.…

  I’ve read the poems suggesting we listen to the slow trees, the slower stones, the much much slower stars. But what if silence was what they meant? Quiet. Not…

  Evaporation is the opposite of a wet dream the residue of dew clear drops beaded           clean                         petals holding forth as the bicycle wheels spun out of control behind the…

  1. At Kmart, I ask Dad if it’s OK only girls grace the packaging of the Lip Smacker chapsticks he’s about to buy—Coco Loco, Blissful Berry, Wicked Grape— three…

  Because the mind wants to be not on time for once, off the books, unaccounted for, yearns for a soft landing from a precarious interior cliff. The mind wants…