Pockets
Pushing the envelope that is his mother the kangaroo joey rides his first heartbeats. As does the wombat, wrapped in darkness, and the cuscus, the sugar glider, flying possum, dasyure. Wise nature, to...
View ArticleNight Opens the Foothills
Mind walks through the house turning off every lamp but one, leaving a trail of small relinquishments— a book turned face-down at the spot where sleepiness overtook the little cogs and wheels, a cup of...
View ArticleSpacious
All these greenings and gleanings in the fields, and her own body moving easily in and out of the weather. Her parents still themselves in their glowing home far away, poised to welcome her. Sometimes...
View ArticleThe Sweet Spot
When I suited up for Little League at age ten, shrugging into a maroon nylon top and pulling on my gleaming white pants rimmed with thick elastic at the waist, I distinguished myself by carrying a...
View ArticleHeaven
The leaves are turning, one by one carried away in the crisp wind. In one letter he penned Coleridge turned away, calling love a local anguish he meant to leave behind him. Away, away, says the blue...
View ArticleForgetting
Hayscent fern in one windowpane, rhododendron in another, red barn siding— you’re staring out the window, as if what you see out there might wake the inner word you want, that fugitive, unfaithful word...
View ArticleWorking with Stone
Making a wall stone by stone as you used to relish doing, or stacking stone on stone in the woods to make a cairn, is like building a sentence word by word. If that’s so, this poem is a word cairn,...
View ArticleBraying
Richie Hofmann – Braying This is the time of day we hear them coming back, when the first sunlight drops to the field like an animal being born, slick and shivering where it falls. Their hooves grind...
View ArticleZebra Finch at Petco
Holmberg Zebra Finch at Petco The male tweezes a bald millet stalk off a sahara of graveled paper. The pert watch movements of his head ignite a ember on each cheek, buff bright the beak’s rose hip...
View ArticleIn the Pentlands
Allison Funk: In the Pentlands Here, where I am buffeted, barely able to stand, a kestrel hangs impossibly still in the wind. I envy its otherness, its look of being somewhere else—...
View ArticleHike to the Black Madonna
Hike to the Black Madonna The aching muscles of my calves began to tremble just as the forest broke away. A white river threaded the valley floor far below. I turned to the right and above the tips of...
View ArticleWhat Enters, What Alters
Many men moving, trying to get something out of the lake. Bending. Pulling. From a raft with yellow crime tape around it. I have to stop dancing to look. I have to find the binoculars, and turn off the...
View ArticleLullaby
The man has been gone so long, his own child won’t know him. She and the woman, they must have their own stories now, their own songs— some for hauling wood and water, others to sweeten the girl’s...
View ArticleThe Story of the Mountain
Home is not what the woman had imagined. Late fall, the fields are cropped to stubble, the mountain already rust and smoke. The trees must have flamed here but she’s too late. The man has threaded...
View ArticleThe New Moon Economy
We’ve all been in towns that wouldn’t have us, whose woods beyond the cemetery hide houses made of leaves, their windows lit low by peat fires, the slow stink of heat rising through trees then sinking...
View ArticleRock Wallabies
Because of their isolation, many colonies of wallabies are going extinct —Sydney Morning Herald At dusk I kill the truck and...
View ArticleNovember
Into this furnace of color a cold rain starts to fall, as if to warn the populace of leaves to pack and go, the armies of winter are on their way.
View ArticleCinema Verité
The movie I grew up in was in black and white, or sometimes in the sepia memory tints things with. The soundtrack was a Victrola playing “I’ll Get By.” The stars were a father with his important...
View ArticleSwift Among the Willows
“all are mere productions of the brain” J. Swift, “On Dreams” Midnight in the deanery, gangrenous flies, his mind having moved from honey pot to excrement, as when God invades the ear....
View ArticleAfter the Meeting, a Red Fox
If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath dusk’s blossom bock, ink-musk ale at rusted window screen, the annual carnival a neon embolism blurring the...
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