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A Book to a Scholar

February 4, 2025
I wake with my spine bent, marred with wear, though lovedand eared, and to this I say: open me, open me again, as a woman might, after decades with her lover on the first unfogged day  of spring, pull the cover back. 

When Daughters Become Women 

February 4, 2025
I could call all of this weather, the sun sewing ribbons  in the snow, but first, as fathers, I think it’s important  that we let all the little girls come inside and shed their deaths like coats, let all the little coats scatter  their snow and their mud and their throats. And then, if we...

Sestina Historica

February 4, 2025
After Du Fu’s “Climbing the Heights” How yesterday’s thoughts caught in a fish netcan interrogate a nation: to scatter soil and knowthat in my tradition, soil formed humans:rake the leaves that whistle in the windthen flower: the long river comes on churning:in hardship I bitterly resent my tangled, frost-white locks, thinking time: to be entangledin...

Leonora and Remedios Cadaver the Domestic

February 4, 2025
They allegory, they revelation, they knife             their oils over parchments, aluminum, cigar spit stains. They even embroider, as expected: eyes on a table, horses on             candlesticks. Long done with harlequins parading as heroes, they jugular  red wax seals in a parlor of green vials             and morphine, sparking the...

He Told Me He Used To Have The Heart of a "Little White Girl" Too Like I was Sposta' Be Ashamed or Gooner!

February 4, 2025
I suppose accountability is only slippery when my name is lodged between the only home  I am safe to claim. stroke your ego  slowly my friend. we can’t all  make money if you’re constantly  dehydrated, said the little girl  in my head. she died shortly after  while trying to be swallowed. please  cover your ears, I don’t want someone more natural to get offended. violence...

The sonnet sleeps on the moon #1 

February 4, 2025
i don’t remember much: just the inconsolability.  *  in the time before language every expression needed their gestures. a chaotic silence: we  assume it was. all the wants diminished &  the needs tired by noon time.   *  in the absence of precision. here is a bird  and there are the bees. And the trees?  blow silently in the knowledge-less wind. ...

& Then #6 

February 4, 2025
because the dishes are not broken we will not apologize for our clumsiness.in return: the story of how you me and we almost had to learn the power of levitation because the rules say that we must leave our shoes at thedoorway. we don’t mean this in a disrespectful way. we play games at all the dinner...

Litany for the Thicket at the Edge of Me  

February 4, 2025
How long have I lived wishing for anything but  this body. A pack of hounds  moving through tall grass. My broken  tongue, a grammar of gunpowder. To be  thicketed in saplings, cool & chiaroscuro  where the fox escapes & licks its limping paw. Yes, make me redbud. Make me trestle. Make me long & lush  as the word rhododendron. Not these lips  sealed...

Augury w/ Stag After Harvest 

February 4, 2025
Stark math, pale field, stubble & chaff— the ravens collect in the torn   upturned chest. How you touched me once,  firstly, freshly our young mouths full   of echo. You said you’d known me  since birth, a vision on the edge   of your sight. How ravens mean  in pairs—2: luck. 4: health. 6: pestilence—  so tidy a ledgering of the...

Desert

February 4, 2025
The years I cared so much for animals were the years my care for me was leaving my body. Athens, Ohio was full of dead and dying cats, which I was always putting my hands on before they ran away. Then we moved to a barren place. Each yard fenced with cinder blocks, the only animal a dead rat I found floating in our...

Gone

February 4, 2025
I did many many many many many boring things. I sat for a show. I clicked on a link. I looked over  and over and over your  paper. Come boring myself, I know what I’ve known:  doing boring is being boring. (I’ve known since childhood: taught by the women who’d talk  by listing each of the errands they’d run) I watch videos: crushing small balls of chalk. One...

Kennings

January 29, 2025
let’s call it a heartrend.  let’s call my memories of you a pastgrave. let’s makea new   word for   it:  friendgrief.  there are only two whaleroads between us.both of us  survivors of choicetheft.  it made it hard to chestopen safely. lasttime we chestopened  each other  the heatball  sweltered in the blueair.  mybonehouse misses your...