Here I Met Jesus They watched us shower so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves.  We were always eating. I gained more than a stone, and all at once the smokers shuffled outside with the ...

Summary  

Ptarmigans   I love Tieta in the morning the ptarmigans would be talking down in the field there during mating season—motioning with his hand— in the berries saying  come here! come here...

prairie my teeth caked with little bluestem and café au lait is a face plant in a dream. effigy of mommy with her walker behind in the wake of swaying grass erased between us. she shrinks below stud...

Shade Rhapsody Shelter in this.  Shave off its edges. A shine bounces off the ruined floor.    Sugar the windowsills to lure in strangers. Swallow shade to shush the light.  Su...

Flammable Pantoum   For as long as we could, we waited and tended the man who smelled like petroleum, flammable man who feared we were half his, all hers.   We tended the incendiary ma...

Today fuck these people fuck these guards fuck this building fuck this food fuck these clothes I comb the pages for a good line. I comb the pages for meaning & metaphor, for grammar & prop...

Today's listing of the day is: DIALOGIST @dialogist.bsky.social #WritingCommunity

After My Son and I Decide Which Selfie   makes me look skinny, I launch my botched ass body across the algorithms #FilterFree. I know Frost meant exactly this branch, this road. But I only under...

My Father’s God is a silent one. Better disguised than the praying mantis and not once recanted. A flame flickered shadow, broken-winged sparrow in my living room, whom I’ve witnessed tend  to ...

People steal scenes. The sweeping green sward, the flock- dotted forest, the far-distant steeple, and the steep cliff of palette-knifed cumulonimbi ought to be enough,   but no, the Dutch mas...

it’s just a ride   centennial of daily specials czech pilsner full-pour a dull illness thought better exponential direction adventure keep adding to it more of it faster sending horse stealers t...

a quiet list of unsettled matters when i go to the grocery store 3:00 p.m. i. cotton       blooming orange          &nb...

Art & Objecthood   I like losing my breath, Pollocking in the wind, white as bleached coral, stiff as the wrist of a Post-Expressionist. Expressing with all the elegance of a busted tongue ...

At the Heart of a Spiral Michael stands before me, says he knows my bible better than he knows the earth we try not to tread upon. His smile carries a mass, isolated and levitated. His smile car...

Direct Address You sit at your desk, starving, trying to transfer $400 from your savings to your checking account in case the Massachusetts Health Connector refuses to pay for your next 90-day supp...

Ripples Picture this:  darkest draped cloth, magnesium powder flash from a match, & slight smoke quickly drifting over figures for forever or for ever how long that image may last.  F...

Unparented Rituals My grandfather devours carambola in the bathtub, the faucet’s underlip weeps, clotted ochres where the enamel resigned. Something unsaintly ferments in the belly of a drain, or a...

LENGTHS When I come in, my friend is in the middle of giving her boyfriend a trim. Chair drug into the kitchen where the hair won’t get stuck in the rug. Once she introduces us, he can’t seem to re...

Self-Portrait as Lesbian Artifact In the neighborhood Rite Aid, museum of my gay awakening, I was browsing butterfly mascara as her voice spoke through Bruno Mars. By this point, everything sounded l...

Hold On

Junk Hour

After the Metal Door Stopper

Temple I. [slepo] something blind A Dr. med. warns my face, paternally inflected, Slim projection , he says. It is invisibly nestled in the seam of me       ...

Sestina In Which I Try to Escape My Inheritance   In a dream, grandmother commands me bol! and I speak to the ancestor in my bone. Stuttering words cross borders, unstitching themselves f...

genesis 22:19   so abraham returned to his young men with isaac, and they arose and went together to beer-sheba; and abraham  and isaac live at beer-sheba.  now after these things...

Reservoir Meditation A season for looking at last leaves:  falling, thin, per-  forming winter  ’s sound like willows or  whipping, white fabric. & still  this nig...

Green Reigns                             &n

Stabat Mater                             &n

Boots The news, then, was full of warnings  A child’s mitten detached at the knuckle             found in a valley   Co...

Picture Postcard from an Atom Bomb Test, Yucca Flats, 1953 How did you know. I was just thinking of the irredeemable, pictured here, as we might stand among them behind a scrim of sunglass ...

Reading Travels to Writing as Sound Travels to Light   The audience doesn’t always know what they want. Most of the time, they want what they don’t want. The director’s job is to fulfill their...

Fear is its own low country after Aaron Coleman   As it coalesces around us, we feel sticky to the touch, thrust into awkward air like a clot coughed clear out of a lung, tree-...

Pulling Over What happened: the rabbit died because I struck it. I struck it quick & so I suppose I struck it well, if we want to put things that way. I should have seen it but I didn’t, not t...

After the Breakup,   she calls me & calls me again, drops off bags of my useless things in the apartment building lobby, tearfully asks Is this the kind of breakup where I buy you flowers &...

primary education   E brings home a lesson from school:  a bullet must move at the velocity of a kingfisher             &n...

Sectarian bicycles   no thank you to the Sistine Chapel—to the instructions written on a curved banana cabdriver prays with us in Arabic we are nowhere near Antwerp or sunshine or the fatal...

On the Line   In the abattoir the white clad women shuffle the assembly, hock, head. The parts greater than the sum. Thus disassembled the thing is a thing, chilly, flaccid, on to be packet, fl...

Cover I will recover such hours: we pick blackberries, for example, and gather them in buckets strung to our hips. The sun backs off slowly with its hands in the air, like a culprit. Then the smell ...

Assigning New Memories to Familiar Places You’re designing space furniture that can modulate and break down after layering nuance into a grocery or a noodle spot in Highland Park. You’re looking a...

The Dimming When she says it again— I have nothing left to live for— my siblings and I look at her, at our mother’s face, the dimming room, and none of us offers How about us? Instead, on...

Mortality: a meditation on Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems The afternoon radio has some nonsense disintegrating in the air, while I’m in the laundry room downstairs folding clothes in front of a di...

Selfie Sonnet [Woman in green lace dress takes a selfie in a coffee shop] I absorb my lace, a tattoo instead of a new layer. I pick my mint skin, I chip like dollar store nail polish, a glade of mea...

Swing Justice   (this is a calculation)   I am this: your Hot Ticket Babe: something tangible pressed against the pixels ...