Her story’s naked but her city is clothed. It wears fog like ermine—soft white, with spots that hide old truths but let her new sins...

Where comfort starts with a strap you decorate your arm with a spike and are complete, like an overflowing ditch. You’d love to think...

Two women lie together against the cold bed, hips and elbows sharp against winter- hardened foam. Hands marked by bedlice, clasping damp...

once i prayed  God, destroy everything that attempts to break us apart . i knew the way His people saw me, their eyes pleading for my...

I. The faded-mulberry lunchbox slumps on the counter. Soft-edged rectangle haphazard beside the sink. A smush and ick. The scent of old...

watched a pickle drop in the so-called pickle capital of the world one of many new years I rifle through the rolodex through the aughts...

for Bill T. Jones, “both a provocation and a comfort" he does love the slash/ both at once although/not as one Still/Here Story/Time’s...

Decomposition For 27 years and two months I owned a y   or it owned me. Now, no such question inhabits my nameplate. Gone, too, l . I...

"The compass is a very simple, relatively cheap and pocket-sized instrument, which works without any specific preparation, under any...

SEVEN-TEN SPLIT big strike gold rush & any second now it’s gonna kick in & down, torch red taillights through blinds which slice  across...

Meadows open like books toward the horizon, pitch and swell with prairie language. I know I am in a dream, and this is my way of...

silking day / light into glass  I might have / become a grandmother / or grasshopper / might have curled inside a flower’s scent of...

The park was cold air —sharp vinegar in the nose. A damp picnic, with family the daughter did not know well. She did not want to be...

You come to this valley where the tall grass trembles in no breeze at all, and the road vanishes in the glow of headlights in fog, and...

Observing a man’s hair plugs   either my new low / or perhaps a new peace /   a petal laid on a pond’s surface / i stare at follicles /  ...

Burr Dream On the night of my dead brother’s birthday, I dream his body has grown feet from his belly. A ring of them, some protruding...

Riskless nights’ suburban memory: a Stop through the plosive, my heart in soil, always punished for one reason or another: because a...

for Tom Mallouk We paused where the river waited behind a boulder, trout sipping caddis flies from the swift current, tree swallows...

any good actor will tell you  it’s not them up there but a kind  of wind  that throws wide the door they have spent their whole lives to...

Easy Victims to the Charitable Deception of Nostalgia By Emily Schulten White Pine Press 2024 The striking cover of this poetry...