When the task is vast and grim, the gods fit you with blinders— bend your focus to the miniscule. Awaiting no godmother, Aschenputtel settles to the work, bows her…

  Taken for granted, his teeth, when taken from his mouth one crisp spring day, suddenly seemed so useful and white (the clever way they end-stopped the sad, pink sponge…

  Winter-honed knife, halving the space between us. Each week, the having and not having. And in the fields beside the road, the calving.

  There’s Monet at the edge of the water-lily pond. It’s 1905. The Great War is still no menace, but he can sense his mission: to paint canvasses that will…

  I am a fourth magnitude star above Manhattan, a full moon rising beside me. I am blue socks in a drawer of blue socks. I am the shell passed…

  The pond we kissed beside was full of soda cans and stars. The bathroom sink continues to drip into the orange stain of itself. The same color would be…

  Hammurabi loved flowers and strewed his bridal bed with rose petals, blood red. Nero loved the fuchsia for attracting hummingbirds and their delectable tongues. Louis XIV sent Madame de…

      "All actual life is encounter." Martin Buber   The cows look slowly up, flick flies with their tails, with their ears, the whole of their flanks twitching…

  His hand sunk in me like a sunset. I lay on my back and listened the night to black. My skin smelled deciduous. I breathed petals in the silence.…

  Dark Lake isn’t bad—necessarily. Dark Lake is the mouth of a cave. A dark pupil in everyone’s eyes. The lost dog opens his soul. Dark spills out on the…

  Think of what the Water takes when it is stirred, or what blocks it grinds to paste no matter early edge or gloss. Yet were his body stone enough…

  When Daniel is dreaming don’t wake him. What he sees will escape time: feather and horn, hunger, what angels do when God points a finger: Pluck men from a…