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Poetry

To the Cuckoo Paper Wasp

The first crisp tool in a small set of perfect lockpicks this slick wasp learns how to twist is time. A solitary operative whose name honors the bird famous for…

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Mojave Ghost

Now he’s watching scarves of cloud slide over the plane’s steel wing. Surely it’s real, this swirl of light. But the visions that confront him do not enter his life.…

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To Attis

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Consider the Wound

no ideas but in wounds, I is that wound with its slight aura, archival glamour, gaslit corridors, its famous sunsets that day-glo on water the storied rays travel to consider…

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Mice

they see a cluster of small rubber ducks & scraps of broken shells & think I’ll shit there we describe them as brazen when they run through what actually is…

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Two Poems from Vexations

Colonies popped out of empire like mushrooms Coral reefs thinned out their amenities, the entire pluck Could be removed en masse for complete evaluation Daughter landed wrong at the bottom…

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Three Poems

grief (disarmament) You’re a terrible witness. Wore stage outfits to testimony and upon returning home in search of his remains, you were really hunting down his flesh of guns. There…

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Two Poems

optimism One sleeps on the rock above a pool of tap water while the other tries to climb the sloped wall, slides down. Tries, slides. Stern face with its one…

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Among the Undressed

after “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” by Hortense Spillers Stepping into the painting, backing up a moment to its edge, any further we’d fall out of the picture, we…

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Three Poems

“Catalpa 29th August 2014,” a unique cyanotype triptych by Tom Fels © The artist. Courtesy Atlas Gallery, London drought Deer raise their ears, as he steps on gravel, then lower…

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Joy*

Like motion, clouds, and cold The advantages of being Also its disadvantages. My child was sleeping lightly, Crying out from time To time in response To one dim version Of…

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Two Poems

and what my species did A woman who cries is not essential personnel. Salt water conducts her to the brink. The first sign of illness is a dry mouth. My…

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Nomenclature for the Time Being

The apocalyptic reports have come true, dilute in our arterial solvent the atrocities saturate our latent notebooks we stay awake lambent there are iridium rectangles under our tables we meet…

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Two Poems

rose-crowned night girl I am pointless. This I come to know, by pressing ear to night’s machinery. Outside, the words rub each other until they are dull: calibrate, resurface, surface,…

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Pippi Longstocking

It happened sometimes you asked me To play with you or differentiate Between black birds or help find Three things wrong and I said no Grackles sing like old springs…

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Two Poems

this pig i This pig I live with really does hover over much of what I do and say it’s in the room I lie in daily when I try…

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Three Poems

vesey on the eve Maybe he should have split every tongue among his fellow Israelites whether they swore on their souls or not. Or gone it alone, based on the…

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The Book of Breezes

Then your curiosity returns to you Just a little wet with tears I welcome it home since I’ve been wondering— At evening—what is violet saying?— It speaks to the part…

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Reasons for Staying

The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family…

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Three Poems

self-care Have you tried rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz in a steel bottle of glacial water? Tincture drawn from the stamens of daylilies grown on the western sides of two-story homes?…

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Four Sonnets

each letter Everyone crowded in that movie theater you found a seat to my left some thirty years later saying little, facing the screen while I use my hair to…

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Woolworth

for/after BPK Across the street from the men in bars of booze, Music, and confinement, a dog walked into a diner To find diners eating, a cat eating, a mouse…

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Two Poems

hearsay What did you say I said? What? And in that dream I was married to her, and she, I don’t know who she was, perhaps she was you, Perhaps…

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Detail of the Rice Chest

In the 2015 Korean film The Throne, the rice chest sits in the center of the vast, symmetrical courtyard of Changgyeonggung Palace. The film is called The Throne in English;…

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Little Music

What a lot of little music can do? The blind farmer Daylights in his cabbage row, going crouched down between leafy skulls, knows. He rises indifferent, far-gazing as a fine…

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Two Poems

think back Say an idea is math without numbers. For instance, you could say that an idea distorts consciousness as a massive object distorts space. Such distortion is sometimes known…

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October 2023

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