Twilight paints sky smoky purple. Grackles pepper this sheet of dusk just above electric lines. Some smear it with their shadow bodies. The ones who land on wires shake them as their toes grasp the tautness, then space themselves like clothespi...

someone wheeled me into ICU         after they’d opened my brain removed the tumor     there is a clean coldness     to this room the beeps of monitors &n...

For all the kettle's whistling I cannot hear a thing. Too busy swimming in the gulf of having you a little and not at all. Last summer, a riptide carried you out to sea. Who could blame the ocean for wanting you? But I do wonder what happened out th...

First the tide rushes in Plants a kiss on the shore  from Ebbtide, Writer/s: Carl Sigman, Robert Maxwell   How glad I am today, awakened first to see you, feel your warmth so near as the sky pulls the sun over the horizon. A golden tide &n...

When my Uncle Lukas died, he didn’t have a will—he just left things for the people he wanted to give things to in cardboard boxes in his kitchen. And even though I didn’t know him very well, my mother told me that Lukas had left a box for me. And I ...

i.  confounds volcanic  stalactic—  if you dissolve in hot springs  expose veins below  water table  fumes will radiate      in perfect patterns  ii.  contains inelastic...

Ma said you ought not to spit. But it’s a habit I picked up from playing kick the can. When I’d lose, I’d get so mad, I’d spit. After kick the can, we’d wander down to the intersection, and Ma would get so mad cause for some reason cars kept running...

I have triumphed over the choking of my body, over my flushed and angry self, my hauntings, the way I carried myself from birth, like death, as though I was alone in the labour room and my mother waited in the corridor, hoping to embrace me in one p...

There’s an unmeasured apogee in summer, when a day holds without time or purpose, when the sun’s insistence is given its due, when the curved apex of living hovers listless and redolent of the sensuous, and for that poised, weightless moment the abs...

Artwork by Mitchell Batavia Morpheus, a frightened boy, mostly played alone. Afraid of noise and strangers, he seldom left his home. But what he feared most of all, was when he went to sleep. After crawling into bed, he’d cower, shake and weep. Onc...

ekphrastic after Christine Crockett “Graphing Uncertainty V” Maybe the problem is I spilled my martini or that it was made with a squashed maraschino instead of an olive. Maybe instead of cherry juice it was actually my heart spilling under the door...

The jar of jelly beans in the window of Bell’s General Store is my only chance to ask Alabama to the carnival. You see, if I can guess the number of jelly beans in the jar, I’ll win the cash prize of twenty-five dollars, and then I’ll have enough mo...

February 21, 11:43pm There are ten thousand little black spiders on my pillow. I shriek and fling it across my room and immediately discover thousands more spiders on my bedsheet. I frantically wipe them all away with my hand as if they were scuttli...

the shape of life distorted stumbles an uncertain sailor legs wobbly speech slurred like lines in the painter's rendering of the gray monotone fog of the mind catacombs of the eclipsing dusk-dawn heart yelling valve teeth open in the discarded ...

after Richard Hugo Richard Hugo says not to choose the topic, not to write a poem because it feels like it should be written. But has he ever been on a beach when a man’s body is fished from the lake, served on a paddle board, and rushed away in an ...