Excerpts
Puberty, as Poem by Akhmatova
The scarcity of milk— that was me, and the queue for a new pair of shoes. I was the Russian verse of frozen feet, the worst winter in memory. I was snowfall left piled on New World Street. I was the boots that walked me black. In the year of the long freeze, other girls …
Teaching English in the Biology Lab
The sea life chart is a prop For Melville, the mounted cat A visual aid for Poe. Pigs and rabbits, unborn, sit On shelves like family photos While everybody opens Their textbooks to Dickinson And Whitman, Wharton and Crane. Tenth grade is the year for frogs Dissected, worms halved and pinned. It’s the year of …
The Body Apologizes for Almost Everything
For overriding your good sense, for tormenting you with hungers, addictions, fevers and pox, for my failure to flood at the touch of one who could have made you happier, for the lateness of the hour in which I finally gave up the egg, for the contractions (hardly God’s punishments but my own prodigious inventions, …
Swan’s Home
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. —Psalm 88 The call comes at high noon, with the sun bright on the rocks and sage, not in the dark midnight hours like Ferrell Swan always expected. On her cell from his old Ohio home, his ex-wife Rilla asks …
Blue Danube
You buy happiness with a steel wick crowbar it to an unyielding clothesline as if the curse of desolation means a loss of buffed shoes a hint of want that drives worm holes into the carefully etched wood. September comes with its thrifty tongue the fragile egg cup the fusion of school days, boxed lunches …
Knoxville, 1979
It is late spring, I am on my knees pulling peanuts out of the red dirt. I shake the thin fibrous stalks, like spider webs, and when I put them in my mouth they taste like metal. I like the scrape of them against my teeth. The hum of the lawn mower grows louder in …
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, …