Dispatch: Unknown Festival, Galicia, April
By Poetry Issue 114
Faith’s a dissonance, a forgetfulness.
Read MoreSpringtime Romance
By Poetry Issue 113
On the decay of flowers. “I love the way they teach me to love / the things I can’t get close enough to.”
Read MoreWinter Empties Her Pockets
By Poetry Issue 105
We will be the young tufts of spring.
My shadow will lay itself down over yours, reader.
We will not cut ourselves open any longer.
Spring Begetting
By Poetry Issue 92
My one-year-old grandson John has climbed up on the couch where I have been reading Updike, and, standing, looks out the window to the lilacs where a catbird spills itself in long bursts of toowees, cluks, whooits and meows and now he, too, finds his way to runs of throaty vowels and a comedic tumble…
Read MoreBackyard Apotheosis
By Poetry Issue 88
All the way to heaven is heaven, Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly said, and on most days, replete with the stabbed, shot, run-over or into, the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken, I’d say bullshit and be done with it. But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming things up, I’m in shorts and a…
Read MoreThe Breaking Strain of Grace
By Poetry Issue 86
Holy Week again: unleavened sky, all tensions held past hold. Mostly, what I feel is the unlikelihood. These days, pick a miracle, there’s science to explain it. Say it’s nighttime in the Garden, Jesus praying in a bloody sweat: Hematidrosis—rare; not unknown— …
Read MoreBone Box
By Poetry Issue 59
I’m not dead so what do I know. It’s a box of bone I’m in. I work the crash site, push glass bits to the ditch with a broom. A swift hit of spring stuns me, but what’s that. My soul’s not cracked in half for its gold yet. It might be bone in there,…
Read MoreThe Invented Child
By Poetry Issue 71
I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…
Read MoreAbsence Blooming
By Poetry Issue 80
This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…
Read MoreThe Concord of the Strings
By Poetry Issue 84
He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar. —Son House on Robert Johnson In November, it’s hard to know a cherry tree is a cherry tree. If it has any leaves left, they’re raw as rust. The sound the wind makes hustling through them’s a…
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