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…
Look in the mirror. Practice saying you’re beautiful. You must say this out loud – you must say this one thousand times until your face believes you. You must say this and see the glorious and wounded contours of the human frame, your broken nose and hooded eyes, creased skin, your crooked teeth, you must…
Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree, new blooms on damp petunias, cups of tea I’ll drink as I thumb Genesis, again, to keep on learning how creation’s never through. On the third day God made ocean and dry land, vegetation, plants and trees – mad synthesis of…
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…
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…
Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed. They look so suddenly earthbound, as if they are what scatters from the sack, blind in January sun, sharp scribbled feet stuck in the drift, so many careless darts – I laugh and laugh. Love comes to this: forgetting our wings,…
