I once had a teacher who loved to cross out the first few pages of our stories – even when our stories were only a few pages long. He…

  We knew they couldn’t really arrest you for picnicking on the side of the road, but we kept reframing our position anyway. There were no signs, we protested, this…

  Under different circumstances, we might have enjoyed having our meals cooked for us, our activities coordinated, but we’d been evacuated from our sites and were worried that we were…

  spring days feel a little salty dry sun, a cold and hard ball of white wind lifts our house up to mid-air, a tree of peach blossom slanting by…

  The shepherd-poet measures himself against the void, cuts from the canvas of nothingness a poet shaped outline which he massages into a coat, his fingers working against its pliant…

  The morning drive east on Trapelo Road. Cars become islands in a fog of light. The white is seamless, a piece of unsewn cloth   laughing in the air.…

  Do not follow me anymore, Atthis, like Sappho I also adored you, but do not sleep in me like a nightmare now. Mirrored in a boy’s soft eyes I…

  When I arrive at your door and you come with a blush apple at your mouth and eyes packed thick with spruce, I let myself think of the photo…

  Locked under linocut trees, slabs with lyrics or long phrases on them. A field of stones that only say “MOTHER” “FATHER” “HUSBAND” in low relief under leaves—the birds of…

              Pine Creek Lake, Montana   Ice-raked granite walls sweep up three sides of this alpine meadow; a stream falls, noisy, down a rocky…

  All the lives inside the compound.   A red moon stalled over Kilimanjaro.   Forces joined. Truces brokered.   Everything you've tried to mend broken.

  Diego painted the mother cradling him. Frida painted him as he was in death— eyelids parted (hold a mirror: no breath). Diego painted the mother cradling him. The mother…