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Apocrypha
Holofernes’ baritone resonates out at audibility’s edge — something Nebuchadnezzar something and clear skies ahead. Judith unbuckles. She and her maid rise, head toward the cockpit along the aisle.
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Estas Son Las Olas De Mi Darién for Joel Felix
when death arrives it will be like an ocean it will sing like the last bird of winter. when it sees me believe that love has been given to me that no heap of dust will name itself to outlive life, when the rain drops gently on the summer and each tree sits in the […]
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A Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night
City trees, an interval of silence, noon. (The moment Mahlers through me.) Ought thought: a narrowness birth-canaled towards the truth of her. To sip her in a cup of water: water’s whirlwind, comprehended. A laurel, deep within its winter sleep, dreams of her, and is devoured. Verb tenses divide us: mine so often past, hers […]
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A Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night
Her flavor is the grief of honeysuckle a prophet’s winter garden the word for grasp in every language a would-be father’s premonition of regret a window slowly brightening green shade as spoken of in a lost verse of scripture a frock of honey bees a yellow cloud above the thought of paradise night-bleach a dream […]
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State Line
A hasty graveyard’s makeshift fence, boarded houses and token snow, stained pavement where a carcass bled, covered horses with no place to go, an old barn slowly collapsing between refineries and grains, a rare bridge among infinite hills, and one last bird (and another) through your brain, stalled boxcars and broken jukeboxes, a field cut […]
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A Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night
The inner spinning like a Rand McNally globe. (The place her finger lands, blindly: my name.) · Yellow stripes of winter air to strip the eye of its reproofs. · Her, imploring: “Touch.” · An eyelash threaded through a sewing needle’s eye. · A game she plays some nights: no lights, no brakes. · The […]
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Within Reason
Woke voiceless, wanting to sing in the city where people say rain spells weather, where one goes gray with waiting. I used to think to find my way around; now I go braving anything that I can’t think to see. It’s hard to risk another, whatever form you take. Things go luminous (within reason) without […]
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Elk Ridge
Night seeps into its name. At the edge where black oak clouds an embankment what I imagined was silence becomes enough music for now — the constellated sounds nouns call out.
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Steady, Less and Less
The day flickers before us in a thicked-up throb of questions. What of birds and the peculiarity of flight — a pattern by which to scratch existence. What of me and the inexpense of sitting in a field with your face to any nameable thing. When simply the having is enough will you ask, “How […]