Conversion
I saw I had to go down to the devil’s hell That was my home. I didn’t want to give up Worldly things but when the Lord got me ready I came leaping and jumping. I fell down on my knees And said “Lord if you will save me I’ll…
The Witch
We try the old ways Wild geranium To stop the bleeding Devil’s clothesline For the burns and sores But our apron strings fall Loose our shoes will not stay Tied the beds rise up We wind up on the floor The clothes hung on the line Torn off till all…
Matryoshka (I see my old age in the faces of three women living in chernobyl’s exclusion zone)
I love my native lands and I love my graves. —Hanna Zavorotnya, The Babushkas of Chernobyl Babushka No. 1 When you unfurl your head scarf, I half expect dupa1-length hair; instead, you wear it thinly-cropped, the grey cut close to the flesh. I suppose it’s easier this way, to sever…
Slow Heat
High strung They called her Unsettled We come home She’d clawed her a notch Jerked the planks right out Said the witch needed her. Ginseng they said Ease the hippo Help her sleep Start slow Build the dose None of us knew What it would take To smother her.
Dungannon in Relief
So all I have are snatches of a dream I can’t remember: roads drawn as if by fingers in the dust, hills with sun-stiff peaks. Escape and tell the story that you know, some ancestor must have said, but no one did. I’m still not sure if anyone remembers it;…
Limited Creatures
He is an outlier as well for all I know, another seizing an opportunity likely to be all-too-rare in weeks, as the ice lays claim to open water, swooping down from his grey and bony precipice to grasp a remnant (something left behind by his careless neighbors) and a shivering…
Book Review: ‘Appointed Rounds: Essays’ by Michael McFee
Michael McFee. Appointed Rounds: Essays. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2018. 224 pages. Softcover. $20.00. “Writers wield such flimsy materials for immortality—the ink that fades, the paper that yellows or crumbles or burns, the books that waste away on dusty shelves, unread,” Michael McFee writes in “Immortality,” the final essay…
Left in the Lurch
I could go on forever in this labyrinth of wood pulp, plucking beeswax stalks off sconces, pulling & prodding at appendages of statues that appear to flinch. …
Book Review: ‘Late Migrations’ by Margaret Renkl
Margaret Renkl. Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2019. 248 pages. Hardcover. $24.00. Late Migrations arrived on a busy afternoon, and I took a moment to flip through it, so inviting was the artwork, the dust cover, the heft of the nice paper…
Reckoning
You keep your failures close, intimate as unwashed sheets—that colleague’s novel left untouched in its box, a dead friend’s corpus of poems that will not see print, an ex-husband who can’t be shaken loose, a lover who comes close but not closer. Here is your photo gallery: mountain landscapes emptied…