Force Majeure
This must be the house moving off its blocks. Hundreds of grackles drop, fold, rise, weave grace and collision as if every sorrow has slipped its yellow beak into the wind and wants me to hear. The breath I just took falls into the sink with an orange peel, …
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Happy Ending
Not that kind! The gutter is no place for a poem unless you’re on a ladder in September because the river of fire in the trees dropped on your roof a month early. Tomorrow you will wake up, carry your hot chai to the window …
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Morphology
What would I know of being a mother. For a month, it has rained. I wait to be rid of it. When I dream it is of a bell, an animal split from the yoke. I wake in a pool of milk. Another attempt to fill the absence. …
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Beloved Disciple
after Plautilla Nelli’s The Last Supper, c. 1560 (thought to be the first Last Supper painting done by a woman, with Nelli using other nuns as models) Again she has us all dressed up as men, the best of men, …
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Cherubs
remember a time before weathervanes, before lawns, before the sun made dew sizzle on leaves. They giggled at Eve as she reached for the fruit, unquivered their arrows. In the paintings, their knees are the color of unnamed roses; dark purple, damp mauve, bruises swaddled …
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Arc and Inverse
for Richard Serra I wasn’t there but heard that from the bridge he slid paints down and into, shading the water. The middle clarified to a tongue of alizarin and cerulean, colors he no longer needed. After paints, he dropped brushes to the dark taste of river: …
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Nocturne for Transmutation
Come here, please. The overboard seeds have brought birds and fish deep into the wake. The slipping glance the sun gives on its way to tomorrow golds each of their feedings. I don’t want to see all of this alone. I don’t want each head disappearing into water or …
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A Dance: for Mary Oliver’s “Dogfish”
Some kind of relaxed inquest I gathered first and sat with. It was your hesitation that lured me sense that you’d lifted your traces off solid ground set them in dark water. White belly, sharpened nail, I began the translation?—the carrying— the air thickened with intention …
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List Poem In Which There Is At Least One Lie
I’ve been trying for months to work moxibustion into a poem that isn’t about sex. According to personality tests I exhibit higher-than-average levels of aggression and I do not dispute these findings. The first time I saw my father slice the head off a bluegill I stared into the eye …
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[I was told the best rituals]
I was told the best rituals are cast by children inside covert forts, hedges carved out by older siblings or the wolf-man from a nightmare in the nineteenth century. In their spaghetti jars: ghosts, not June bugs or ladybirds or unreasonable expectations to be happy. Some children are not happy. …
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