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Danish scurvy grass

October 16, 2025
grows rampant in salty ditches. An accident--al ecosystem, we humans coaxed theminland with gritters and cars. But today my children forage the coastal weedsun-seeded by the fjord. We let the flesh--y green leaves unbuckle their mustard in our hands and sparktired tongues wide awake.Clusters of their horse-radish flowers scent the seam of high tide.Shallow taproots...

Spurs

October 16, 2025
I’m thinking of a number between one and gun control. I’m reloading a cartridge of knockoff Microsoft ink. I’m rethinking the licensed requirements in my wallet. I’m calling this summer Blood Summer and so are you and so are you. I’m slumbering in my bunker. You’re somewhere in your bunkbed. Both of us are writing...

THE SKY WAS WHERE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE  

October 16, 2025
And lately, I haven’t been  able to tell the spiders from their wisps. One parachuted into your coffee, and instead of dumping it  you stirred, and said I am unencumbered  by solitude. Said it is easier  to incorporate with something you can touch, so let’s  not speak so much. As for days I can count on you’re in all of them. Quit  retreating...

When It’s Over

October 16, 2025
Strangers touched me inside, this time with a large boreneedle. They told me when it was over. I didn’t get to say. Not when it hurt a little, not when it hurt a lot.When they pushed the fentanyl, I thought, Oh, I’m afraid, the way I might notice, then name, a butterfly lightingon a blade....

from MONOLITH 

October 16, 2025
See, it’s a blast, and then it’s over.  The ending’s making its approach, but not as   I hoped. I thought maybe the Panthers   win state and after the music, the parade,   time takes a turn, spring night walks the street  out of traffic, folks look up at each other  from where they lie in the...

Brand New  

September 16, 2025
In the first days when I was rabid and rangy and dead quiet and orange Crush Over pebble ice was beyond belief. When I hiked Bear Mountain on Valentine’s Day  In Jordan 4’s held together by gaffer tape. The world that I could touch. The big blue  Face of the sky that I could kiss. Come to Pathway,...

Fresh Fade 

September 16, 2025
Grant isn’t great at cutting hair, but he is gentle.  I sit down and let him do what he wants. The light  In March is white and cold, and Luca and Gianni are  Waiting their turns, shirtless and shivering, we try to be men  Among men. At first, Grant steers my head tentatively, Using his fingertips to guide me, now...

Dryad

September 16, 2025
That trees seem souled, yes. Less plain is what a tree nymph would want with a woman’s skin.  The hunter’s camouflage, the soldier’s thatch cape, the bark Daphne grew to thwart  a god’s caress—say what you will   about their purposes—  for metamorphosis to run  in that direction at least  makes perfect sense.  But why an oak, its mind  an owl, its larynx a wren,...

The Button Coat

September 16, 2025
                             Button Coat, Gift of Mrs. Cecil Cowell                              Grand Rapids Public Museum  Not septuplets, a paisley of embryos in the womb, and not matches in a book,  an incendiary choir—  my parts are not a brood waiting to be born or undone,  each a short-lived excuse  for its own tongue of fire.   If they are a brood, my parts are a world:...

Another Extinction

September 16, 2025
Death makes names songless.  We lose a warbler in November and  December holds the silence.  Under a full moon a shock of lichen  writhes and we press  our fingerprints into its growth.  We look through blue forest  into its parking lot, loud  as the birds that used to sing.  The forest is silent.  Death hears only death— who names us.  

The Juvenile Street Cleaning League  

September 16, 2025
was invented, once upon a time, in New York, at the end of the nineteenth century.  Network of immigrant children, on the Lower East Side, in white caps.   Who walked the streets, reported on those who littered.    Who kicked bottles and apple peels to the gutter to keep sidewalks clean.  Who were the eyes, ears,...

red angel shivers 

September 16, 2025
                                        –carnelian  shadows play between cracks  salt-scarlet    shell-sweeper              moss-fruit     silver-first  shadows twist into webs      cosmos-thick    blooming  into layers of mystery     white heat               shines from the stone’s inside    leaking   into edges    rain diadem   poison       bud   peak of eternal flies  there is otherworldly beauty beneath us              points of starlight    a green eye sleeping   within the mountain    ...