Poetry
The Skookum Indian
since 1921, Wenatchee, WA Above the Dollar Tree those dark eyes shift side to side all day and all night. Now and then one of them winks. He’s a giant motorized head, this Indian of ours, with a cartoon nose … Continue reading
The Empty Road Full of People
Wenatchee, WA Everything looks right in this photo of the 1910 Fourth of July parade taken from a rooftop near Palouse. Black and white world of hand-lettered windows, men in hats on crowded walks, and power poles striding toward a … Continue reading
At Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston
The Death’s Head turned into an angel over time, its crossbones into wings— side-by-side, you see it with this girl. “Here lyes buried the body of Rachel” (her headstone used for a crayon rubbing), the Death’s Head turned into an … Continue reading
Cotton
I’m at Cotton Mather’s tomb in Boston— it’s part of the burial ground on Copp’s Hill: there’re more Death’s Heads here than men or women. The woman with the stroller waits for her husband, moving from headstone to headstone, to … Continue reading
In the Valley of the Shadow
How she remembers, years after her mother died, that big lake in her childhood, so wide, her father pronounced solemnly, you couldn’t see across. How that first lesson in unfathomable distance stayed with her, the limits of vision, the senseless … Continue reading
A Development
Maybe this will stop her, the cardinal who’s flinging herself at the windowpanes: a row of cobalt bottles on each sill. I thought she had lost her mate, lone widow seeing herself—shadow of scarlet—in the glass, or had eaten something … Continue reading
Portrait of the Artist as a Spark
Between the gas and the can my lower leg disappeared in a blue and orange flame. Nothing is more articulate than fire. It moves in slow motion at the speed of light, a ragged language, raw and messy, that leaves … Continue reading
Dumped at Heaven’s Gate
When a hurricane spirals down, spinning like an unhooked tongue shrieking in the wind’s wet mouth, beheading trees and cracking open the sky, pregnant cows in the fields let down their calves. Whether the cause is barometric pressure or the … Continue reading
The Toad
Yesterday I found a desiccated toad, sucked out and weightless. Each toe – long, curved, delicate as eyelash. The twin eye sockets, the slit of the mouth, the froggy bend of the back knees flexed to jump. Only the insides … Continue reading
Moon
She is the daisy, all crude lines and crayon, the first-grade boy drew for his mother. She is a crumpled-up letter. She is the reason why the teen-age boy throws the stone at his father’s eye. She lights the red … Continue reading