Poetry
Two Hauntings
It’s mostly slag, the geologist says. He squints at each chunk of my dead grandmother’s rock collection, then up at me to see if my feelings are hurt. Glass, leftover. He tries the amber lump with his pocketknife, to see it break, I guess. Some copper ore, too, and basalt. Could be from anywhere. Her …
Risk
After he steps from the ladder to the limbs of the tree, he has to stop and holler an explanation to his wife, who’s seen him from the house: A baby swallow, he yells. It fell from the nest, and he knows she knows, though she does not say so, the idiocy of what he’s …
Descending on Iowa
The Mondrian blocks and lines of late autumn fields, browns etched with black and gold and then the blue-gray leaking of rivers and streams, edges thick with oak and maple on fire in the sun, still, how many years later, the ground rising faster, the grain trucks yellow, the dust following, farm houses ghosting by, …
Interior Perfection of the Mohave
Once familiar voices sighing like company overheard the lunatic Joshua-trees and absolutes of sun and sand say with the night wind chatter where will you stay? lines in sand, no roads to answer to, washboard weave, waves of an old seabed over these bones once making claims—and California sliding into the sea again how will …
To a Limited Extent
it’s not about how far you fall but how: you could break a leg by missing what you’d barely call a height, like the bottom step, your mind on another planet, your body dully at home, moving laundry or a chair. The damage may be minor, but it quietly ruins your plans. Never again, you …
Evening
A driver holds open the limo door as a diplomat steps in. Closer to the center a man leans over the edge of an upper balcony and shakes out his pink duvet. What is he hoping will drift loose: a single lost eyelash, the memory of her body, or does he only wish to capture, …
[white paper #15]
and then when they couldn’t afford it but they did afford it they hired Cecil to wash iron clean once a week my mother picked her up and took her back to the colored section of town and once she had my mother to lunch with her friends and sometimes they prayed together including the …
A lick’s a mistake a creek tries to forget,
a creek’s much bigger, something the river must accept. Except Crummies Creek, which enters the Cumberland as just a puny stream, having been dammed thirteen miles up its mouth and made to flood the mining town. You’d need to boat to the middle to feel as if it might still be in there, deep, current …
Makeup
Blind now, my mother tilts her chin up, closes her eyes to receive the liquid foundation I stroke across her brow as if bestowing a benediction. The last time I touched her face my fingers were small, her glamour a mystery. I smooth and blend the beige into fissures bracketing her eyes, nose, and mouth. …