Poetry

Calling Out the Dead

♦
Fall 2015 ♦
I was a sound sleeper in my teens. My mother’s voice used to break through my dreams, waking me for school with news. Hey, that funny guy from Saturday Night Live died, what’s his name, Ackroyd? Or, They shot one of the Beatles. I’m trying to hear her tone again,…
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Night in the Burned House

♦
Fall 2015 ♦
In my old bedroom, in this house now my Aunt A’s, walls mottle grey into black, char hiding that this room was ever painted purple in a hope that someone would guess, would know. Burning night, my hidden journals blown across the field—and my aunt, gathering boughs for wreaths, found…
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Memorate

♦
Summer 2015 ♦
The field. Light. Morning. Then, my father, uncle. Apples, everywhere. In boxes, in palms, in teeth. Apples, everywhere. The black mare. Wild. The black mare that dawned from the mountain. Wild. The rough sketches of my earliest memory. My father places me on the back of the beast & we…
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Hateful

♦
Summer 2015 ♦
my Granny said, her pleated velvet cheeks aquiver as we watched the battered Fords and coal trucks splatter gravel from the road above the porch. That’s one thing I can’t abide. I don’t remember who it was or what he did that made my Granny spit his name like chaw…
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Shadow

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Spring 2015 ♦
Across clearings, an eye—Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox” Mushrooms on the trail indicate you haven’t roved this prairie of late; soft-sponged and pink, they’re sweet as the berries ripped in your teeth. “Foxes are opportunistic feeders,” notes a sign—I never mind the goldfinches who arc my breeze and swap big bluestem…
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Refrain

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Spring 2015 ♦
The birches dizzy me, shaking down their mint and white confetti crowns around the Scarlet Tanager, a trilling sky-high king: red come orange, come black, come green. From this forest freshed with song, a goose lay drawn, opened in a field ringed in feathers— orange come red, come black, come…
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Rural Stigmata

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Winter 2015 ♦
I’ve nurtured the glowing wound: peroxide, salve, bandages. I’ve done right by this one. The rawness eased, was replaced by budding infant cells. Trenches formed in the nickel-sized spot where my fate and life lines intersected the injury, two deep vertical red canals in a waxy purple-pink circle: a burnt…
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Sling Shot

♦
Fall 2014 ♦
Chalk dust. Is returning really so simple? From the hallway, he can see through the open door of the abandoned classroom, through its far window, and out into the hay fields that lay beyond. There is a single bale rotting against the fence. They would stack them, he remembered, build forts…
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The Apple

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Fall 2014 ♦
People drank the apples          John “Appleseed” Chapman planted       during his Ohio migration to Marietta by catamaran          his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of            Prohibition before the Women’s           Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider            …
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Waiting for the Invasion

♦
Fall 2014 ♦
In other years I watched the sky for birds flying south in formation. This year they pass in unbroken lines through my sleep, driven down on machine wings. I know the voice you use for telling children not to fear every droning sound that scatters their play like shrapnel or…
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