Poems

Three, today, is
the happy morning number
of soggy robins in the closest tree,

Books of advice, magazines, secret cures,
formulae, strident pages
stiff-legged and shouting…

I like walking the house at night,
my husband asleep
beside my absent shape.

Look in the mirror.

Practice saying you’re beautiful.
You must say this…

Nine chickadees hunch
in the packed snow of a tire track
picking spilled seed.

Begin
from the premise
that your life’s your own
again

Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes felt like hers, the same way the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck did not surprise her, the same way the knife had missed her toe – of course it had – when…

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…

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…