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I Allowed Grief to Cradle Me

November 10, 2026
The first time I saw human death was when I was six years old. Our dad took us to our great aunt June’s funeral. When viewing her body, my first dead body, I saw her eyes closed, her hands folded at her chest, wearing a sparkling pink dress. Her hair also looked different from the...

This Nameless Mantle

November 10, 2026
 The first thing I did after they fired me was go to the park. I had expected them to hand me a cardboard box to pack my belongings, like they do in the movies, but I had brought nothing to the office except my company laptop, which they took, and a fidget spinner that easily...

WHAT I HEAR I HEAR

November 10, 2026
A low ringing in the ear of the forest.  An animal, never more than one year from death, dragging forward in time. If I’m patient, I’ll listen while a mate calls to other mates, while she gathers herself for this or that. Maybe I’ll leave these words alone to rise and fall by themselves—drinks swallowing their ice. Last summer I grew at the waist, and...

Ode to Platinum-Grade Silicone

November 10, 2026
 “If you call fucking making love, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”  – Diane Seuss   A still life of my arm languishing off the boxspring, the wand limp and sliding from my palm, the strap buzzing its modern concerto—subito piano.  Your moaning quiets my womb and I wish for Medusa in the mirror—let me stay— marble cooling you from the inside. I remember when we...

Funeral Mistake

November 10, 2026
Jerry’s father died in a car crash along with two fishing buddies and it made the most sense to have all three funerals on the same day, in the same cemetery, so everyone could attend each burial, boom boom boom. Jerry’s father was the last of the three burials, and just as his coffin was...

F_el_ Note: Glacier Dream

November 10, 2026
* Block Poem I imagine myself one of a pair of sedimentary rocks. A varve. Couplet of alternating layers. Coarser summer sediment with finer winter sediment. Even the glacial lake preforms poetry. Each couplet an annual cycle. To be counted in a type of dendrochronology. Count my layers. The coarse grains of me mix with...

F_el_ Note: Withness

November 10, 2026
* I came to the glacier with empty in mind. What empty leaves space for. Not about traversing the void —the void itself. Memory, a void too. First memory: Sun on my forehead. M’s arms around my waist. Alden Motel only backdrop. Whole world wrapped in tercets. First poem in me. Let me be an...

F_el_ Note: Relational Chatter

November 10, 2026
* First skymouth. Then gathering. Tongue licking land, licking mountains, lakes, air. Glacier’s touch-language. I carry Smith’s term in my throat. Here before the climb up the Perito Moreno Glacier. All I lick with my eyes. All I graze with my body. Traces of me left—lint of me on your sweater, my six-sided form dissolves...

Elk

November 10, 2026
I am an elk. That’s what I say when anyone desires an explanation of how I absorb the signs and signals of the world around me. If someone has too many rules, my antlers go up. If someone wants me to set the table, I balk. I am a male elk, of course, so I...

Marion performs CPR

November 10, 2026
The first time I watched Marion perform CPR was on the fuzzy, gum-stick floor of the induction room. Plastic ribs did their soft clicking. Marion is breaking the sternum of a latex torso called Tom. I was assigned to Tom’s infant, entire body still intact and gummy. Name’s Rose, one of the first-aiders tells me,...

After-School Girl

November 4, 2026
There is nothing interesting to say about those last years of her virginity. She had no choice. She got a job. Three afternoons a week she emptied the drug store’s trash bins, washed the day’s utensils and tupperware in the staff kitchenette, and delivered paper bags of pills to the thresholds of the town’s frail...

Render the Face 

October 27, 2026
On a painting by Kay Sage   Gray, but right. The shadows move, misty, through   each structure & out of what can be  rendered by limits.   Perhaps what we need to know of this  is that for too long, the world   I’ve been lost to,  is the world of this making.   Like most, I’ve built from abandon,  from what’s been lost— ...