Poetry
Four Poems (after Catullus)
TO LIZZY Thanks to you I’ve become a Facebook stalker. Every day, I Google you five or ten times just to look for any ideas to help with getting you back. Now I know that your newest boyfriend, Lucius — … Continue reading
Small Funeral
I find him huddled on the lawn, a silver tom turned stiff with frost. A portion of his skull is gone. A frozen ring of blood’s been tossed in jagged fans. Now here he lies, where first November ice preserves … Continue reading
Huntersville Prison: Winter, Early Lockdown
(after the photograph by Alan Kincaid) They’re still sitting there, doing time, in the cellblock – convict-cut and canted quarry rock from the Depression – after evening chow, at the picnic table, until lights out. Shutter-stilled, forty years ago, in … Continue reading
A Year into the Depression
Father sold the horses, grumbling, Fewer bellies to fill. Their lives for ours, you know. We were openmouthed screeching baby birds, all appetite and sound, and we knew we had to amount to something, to make it worth the swap. … Continue reading
Recovery
to Jesse Better a small, wild death (the doe and perhaps a trailing pair of fawns) than your Ford flipped into the Hocking where Scott’s Creek meets the train yard. In this place it makes sense not to swerve when … Continue reading
Wildwood Wife
Taking a fancy to the woods I marry if for no other reason than I liked his place. Call me moonchild, triggerfish, dreamer, or a kettle hole dolly with a big mama style. From Bearing East to Quadrant Hill I … Continue reading
Skunk
A smell you can taste. Road-kill, its cloud is a sudden smother of summer night. Pole kitty, says the driver to cute up the stench. Just don’t frighten them you remember your father saying as they meandered near the porch. … Continue reading
His Chair
After lunch and before he went back to the fields, he’d catch a nap there, a quick 15 minutes he said “percolated him.” He’s in the fields for good now and in that chair, now in my living room, his … Continue reading
Pretty
the world I saw after he pulled me up onto the saddle so pretty I whispered into his backbone, the taste of his sweat through the rough of his shirt, on my tongue pretty snatches of lovesong and doe-si-do, as … Continue reading
Silky
Such a story she told me, already beyond the listening age, ready to walk by myself to the river and dream I was a rainbow trout rippling. Ripplefish, I call them. ridding the depths of all danger, for how could … Continue reading