Ned Balbo’s 3 Nights of the Perseids, winner of the 2018 Richard Wilbur Award is a collection that gazes upwards and outwards, as well as...

Revitalizing what morning has not known the mountain it must cross its snowcap and melt around a single spring flower the blue slate sky...

Tardive Dyskinesia She spoke seven languages. She spoke in tongues. She spoke in neologisms. She mumbled her words. The rolling of her...

The Little Miami River is my father filling his shirts and slippers with the applause of pulses sipping mudbank coffee with the precision...

He still obeys her rules. No dirty boots on her kitchen floor. Dishes are washed, put away. Her piano is shuttered, but music books are...

Impermanence Today I watched surf seep into a footprint that looked like yours. Canals of toe depressions melted into waves. The sole,...

Low clouds hug Nashville. Block after block of bars, neon signs dim at 9 a.m. Band flyers blanket Broadway, crumpled next to ads for the...

I saved your hand-made terry pink sleeper from 36 years ago, you the child I had no name for. Your sleeper, washed, tucked away,...

Where Dreams Come True The bathroom attendant asks me when my shift begins. In my silver dress, I look like a shake dancer. Soon, I tell...

--For Amanda Phillips In case you missed the story of the barista struck by a truck in Inman Square in Cambridge, a ghost bike, painted...

To a Stranger I come out from behind the walls of my house and stand in my front yard and imagine that the pear tree in bloom is a gift...

JOLTIN’ JOE they took his dad’s boat away after Pearl, when everybody from Seattle to San Diego was running scared no wops in San Fran...

Have you come to hang your head? Have you come to hide your tears? The hinge on my door squeaks, announcing the weary. I know your sun is...

At the Track, 1945 Behold row upon row of shed row stalls hunkered in early morning mist, as Dave threads his way to the office,...

After Tornado Warnings Rain, banshee winds, stuttering lightening slashed the sky all night. An hour ago, all the drama stopped....

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Disillusioned Some days try as I...

Running, free, I remember, the recess yard at Eden Gardens. Walking, calm, to the bus-stop, past the junkyard and the field with the...

Triangulation He says that foremost Mao Zedong was a poet, and knew that all poetry must at some level be political, must incite the...

Seedless Between Ubud and Kuta there are strips of sugarcane and a trail of footsteps I leave behind. See—walking’s harder with mountains...

“You know,” Tony said with a smile, “they’d like to vent volcanoes.” “Drill into them to relieve the pressure— imagine gas escaping. like...