for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
Books of advice, magazines, secret cures, formulae, strident pages stiff-legged and shouting expert in the public square of the indomitable truth, snapshots of the honeymoon, paradise in silhouettes, champagne, a silver script: it all flares up so eagerly to flame, takes the match like a lover’s hand hungry to dissolve. How urgent to abandon others…
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
She bought the rugs in Peru where aji amarillo hung like citrine gems in the lobes of market stalls, old women, shriveled peppers, calling to the American girl lank in slacks, the languor of such heat dark in the roots of her hair. She didn’t take a lover there, but loved to listen to the…
