She tries to bring herself to care. Him, him— It is always about him. Some days she wants to dress all in white. Some days she wants to flood her body cobalt and iridium, wants to glow from the inside out. Wants to walk the rehabilitation ward’s halls and touch each penitent’s bowed head. His …
On a good day, her invitation seemed to arrive for me with edges threaded in gilded floss. Sealed up elegantly with our family crest (I am waxing dramatic here on rose hips and fragrant hibiscus leaves). She offered me the beautiful, fruited ceremony of mothering at times. Well-mannered in pose. Queenly in carriage. Smiling with …
He loves going down to Norfolk’s docks when a ship comes back from deployment, all those sailors ringing the top deck at parade rest, the white of their uniforms as pure as uncut heroin. He’s never been aboard a boat bigger than the ferry that shuttles him daily across the James but can’t imagine life …
My job is writing poems / and reading them to a cloud. —Mary Ruefle All of the miracles have been verified. The hand and the nightmare collide when the husband slaps his wife. The noodles cook anyway, and the sniper is successful. Two cicadas sleep an extra year, and when they emerge, dapper and refreshed, …
The first time I heard the story of the prodigal son, I was in college and always jealous, imagining him in his father’s robe and ring, eating all that calf. Dishonor is worse than death. I believe it because I’m Indian and hear so many stories about unkept marriages and children who leave their parents …
In the humid honeycomb of night, trucks loaded down with carnage stutter at the pumps. Neon tubes sell cigarettes, the news, an umpteenth million chance to get it right. I buy one for a dollar. We roll south and east, past fields of ripening hops and wheat, high plateaus fashioned from forgotten seas. Knuckled apple …
It all comes down to my friend telling me he’s an empty basket. Why not fill it, I ask, with the dead of night, the wet light of morning, or maybe a sigh? Next, a layer of sound— the bark of an unseen dog, song the cricket hauls to my porch to drown out the …
The leaves at the window have been looted pocked with absences air holes eye holes, we’ve eaten more spaces for the light we’re never quite sated by trees fields oceans orchards in bloom dandies in suits. We cannot stop eating eye candy my best royal blue jeans tightening the noose on my waist your new …