Granddaughter After She found the ex-convict on the dark web. Memory of it flenses like ravens on roadkill. The pills dampen the stink of him and she forgets about hanging herself. My son chokes wh…

Alive for Breonna Taylor I have been driving this car with no inspection sticker ever since I bought it last year, and I have not been pulled over. I have watched birds in the park and no one calle…

Nothing Much to Report Tonight Just the light from the moon’s 100 watt bulb, shining through the trees, and the wine and weed just now starting to open up some of the parameters of perception, a bi…

The Language of Keys keys do not unlock doors anymore they translate them each turn carries a meaning I cannot fully inherit grief, maybe or weather folded into metal I keep them in my pocket like …

Cart It is Saturday morning and I walk to the café, avoiding the storm that rolls in– black clouds hang from the luggage cart wheeled from trunk to room. There’s no place I claim on this Earth. As …

Bethlehem in Minneapolis The deer cast long shadows on the pasture fence; with three crowned heads, they are wise creatures walking to the city for the birth of a necessary miracle. There is a murm…

The Factory of Your Lungs Smoke tastes like metal on my tongue the foreman smiles in sulfur, his eyes soldered to the conveyor belt of our bodies. We punch in at dawn, our breaths counted like rive…

Saturday online book club I do that thing where I sip Riesling from a coffee mug, blow on the surface, cradle the ceramic to my chin as if nursing the warmth. My cheeks flush nicely. This book club…

Muscle Memory How many people have refolded this same page that I am folding now above a poem clean as the mountaintop? A vantage point that connects aloneness with everything? Even my bones know w…

Emily as Lamp-Lit We are two charged forces becoming ghosts & luxury, freedom & the witness of freedom. The terrible night is ours & it’s not so terrible. Give me a loose connection to …

Another Estate Sale Gravel showers the windshield of pollinated pick-up shining bed and body black as the bible, my body in the passenger seat frail as faith. Forest fires rage on up north, but not…

Dear Mom When you met Dad, you were nineteen. A tiny woman, blushing hair and skin the colour of San Francisco summers. He saw you in front of the olde-time movie house, a Charlie Chaplin film mimi…

Virtual Engagement you have no name except the one you change your next wish casts rainbows like a diamond ring while the guys in pop songs demand your story or your silence—whichever provides the …

Love is a destiny moving forward We’ve stopped living inside ideas, cloak the world in reality; birds scream in light and our love and our love is and our love is a crucible of ash of fire of of of…

SPRING IS SOON Before you say if to the road, you have to draw the curtains over every mirror. You have to sanitize the voices in your mind. The mornings are all the body can feed on. They buzz lik…

Maidens Finally, a restaurant in our rural town that isn’t local and family owned a chain restaurant something our parents say like it’s a dirty word which only adds to the allure frantic excitemen…

A Night Sky In Maine A shooting star, my cousin says I crane my neck up to see into the dark Maine sky Stars as plentiful as pinholes in a cushion But we see no more meteors With our hazy young min…

Uncle Frank The car is hot, hot, too hot, we can’t roll the windows down fast enough Everyone is, already. Already annoyed, already hot, sweaty, damp with irritation and that’s when Mom glances dow…

Peppermint Summer Miniature treasures hidden in my grandmother’s purse. My fingers scouted out the red and white discs, and anticipation crackled with the cellophane. It created a snowball fight on…

On mornings Before they die mornings taste like mint toothpaste. I had been asleep before, safe from sad news, rocking myself dead by the sink. The splintering of smoldering water snapping like gui…

the warmth of burning we need fire— to shine a little brighter, to feel a little warmer. gathered for a friend’s birthday, we each search for flame. is there no match in the cake box? does anyone h…

Danang 1967 The dresses they wore, long silk affairs in residential streets shaded by trees. As if snatched from sky to earth, blues and greens yellows and golds, silken rainbows with backdrops of …

After almost twenty years I. in your orbit I realized you were never the sun— or that maybe I was actually now in some distant galaxy and you had become a red giant surrounded by gas planets. Light…

Moon Landing for Jason Ryberg it’s taken me eighteen months to get you to understand how with only one eye i need twice as much light to read a book or catch the outline of a girl’s face on a wide …

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A poetry e-zine

A poetry e-zine