Sweetgum I roll a spiny sweetgum ball between my fingers, growing used to the dulled pricks, as I sit, cross-legged, on a concrete...

AUBADE I awoke just past dawn, pillow-headed, the lamp still burning from last night’s read, my neck a rusty hinge. Then I remembered my...

Io in Modern Dress (About Lucien Freud’s “Girl with a Leaf”) The spiked leaf pierces my eye. I was the one who saw, the one who couldn’t...

LACEY Lacey completed five self-portraits and one landscape Now she rested surrounded by the five self-portraits and one landscape She...

Walnut A belittled brownish brain Hardened within spiky skin Keeps all the cloud-like secrets of The passing season, cursively In each of...

Destiny of the Modern-Day Gladiola I kneel in my garden. Once boasting upright, tight-fisted buds, now a carpet of leaning green stalks...

Traveling when i die i just want my wife to dump my tired bones right on the porch none of that fancy schmanzy futile funeral nonsense...

BIRDBIRDISTHEWORD Crouched in the paddies with the wounded Waiting hushed until the hum Like a loud dragonfly, the rotors whirring. Bird...

The Neighbor Killed Snakes Each spring they swarmed the Jehovah woman's garden, ten or twenty a day, hundreds in the length of a week....

And She Moves (On some lines from Nick Cave / for Naomi) And she moves among the sparrows and seed falls from her hand like droplets from...

Casting Off Rose had taken to reusing paper plates. She’d brush them off—a bit of grease didn’t matter. Another cheese sandwich, chips...

Cezanne Speaks to Artists Who Wait to be Inspired “I struggle with the meaning of life. I paint the ambiguous appearance of reality, and...

REFUSE If, in the moments after we left you pulled in to the new Howard Johnson Motor Lodge you would’ve seen two faded husks of old...

Transformation Light changes slowly with subtle words such as cautious and determinedly, marking a demarcation line across the horizon,...

Poetic Joust “Why allude to the pinion of the linnet’s wing,” he said, “when brother poets sing of ailerons on sleek silver birds? “Clean...

Agoraphobia It was when I turned the clocks back I remember the freedom the fear When my foot first crossed the threshold of the large...

A Grammar for Snow I who have yearned a lifetime to learn their names like a discoverer in a foreign land. Blizzard and squalls, bands...

An American Hero plunk-plunk turn fire swish though a ball through a net doesn't make that much sound and there were three seconds left...

Beginnings An old sneaker splits a vent and suddenly it’s shoe shopping day again; or maybe it’s not new shoes but the start of the old...

LEFT BEHIND Sunrise was heaven—from first rosy blush outside our farm bedroom, to full-blown spectacle of rouged sky, to heart-quickening...