I’m lagging. I’m supposed to be with a group of little kids on a walk down to the river, but I don’t want to go. It’s a walk they always send us on when we come to the 4-H camp for one of the Iowa Quaker gatherings. An older cousin, Nancy, is leading the group... Continue Reading →
I see pictures of you when you wore a girl’s body and it’s like you were in drag. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. In the most intimate days of my life I loved that body, its softness and folds, as I love you now: sideburns, Adam’s apple rumbling voice, far-blue eyes.
You drove, so I tried to describe them, witches dancing, opening their arms to the mountains, Sangre de Cristo. These trees have their own mission. Their bark is black and each limb has its own life to live. That’s what I said. You said ok, poet, they might be bigtooth maples Rio Grande cottonwoods or... Continue Reading →
A friend died the same day another friend gave birth. I was all commiserations and congratulations, and the former were clichéd and prosaic and the latter forced and cursory. I don’t know whether sorry and happiness worked on one another to achieve some kind of insipid mean or if a poet, away from his writing... Continue Reading →
in morning light I load boxes onto a truck to be delivered to distribution centers far from here I do this fifty hours a week sometimes more at the same dock sweating and aching I don’t make the stuff I don’t see it in a store to me it’s all just a box I’m the... Continue Reading →
The paper looked and felt real, but the words on the ballot seemed anything but. Was Jake really going to vote for scrapping the oldest and most widely known constitution in the world? On his way into the voting precinct, he’d been called “asshole lawyer,” “democratic terrorist,” and “constitution killer.” Perhaps he’d taken things too... Continue Reading →
about this piece Octocapitulants2025Visual Poetry/Digital Art
Everything is still inside of itself, and I’m looking at you through the fire again. My blue hydrangeas are wilting in the larger shadow of my pink hydrangeas. There is a circle of bridges at the end of the world, connecting themselves to each other — this is all a selfless effort, they think, but... Continue Reading →
We blew out enemy brains then blew our trumpets mopped the floors of clotting blood tuned our horns, turned our backs marched forward into the flood We were afforded no quarter we had bitter love for lack of agenda we blasted our way into the black, backs against bleak, narrow spaces skins of the dead... Continue Reading →
I wanted herto step away from the pond.Less Narcissus,more nurturer. She called me a whorebefore she called me victim—never survivor. I wanted my mother to love melike she loved the man who raped me,like she loved her next drink,her own reflection,the sound of her own voice. Instead,she stayed at the water’s edge,kissing her own reflectionwhile... Continue Reading →
