Poetry

I’d come into the room & try to write
a different ending on those anonymous walls. 
There was less time all the time
until time changed. You know what I mean. 

This hill, even if a small one, this hill with us and the dog the same dog 
forever moving shadow-like down it, to where the hill disappears…For 

If hunted for oil, hunted for light.

After the terror, the whales swarmed.

In the evenings, we watched Jeopardy. 
Wore surgical masks once she got sick.
Before that my mother sent me to the store
for cigarettes all the time. Pack of Salem Lights.

Of birdsongs, I know only three
for certain: cardinal, blue jay, raven,
though perhaps the last two
don’t count—not as song. More call
than song.  More cry, by which I mean

I wore the face of the animal to lure the animal into shooting range.

This was symmetry. 

I want my web to hold. I want to repair
what I have made. I was not given the gold hive.
In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds. Spinning
my body inside of hairline emptiness, I project

There’s this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same

The Gold Codes are the launch codes the president must keep on his person to initiate a nuclear strike.

Nicknamed “the biscuit,” there’s something domestic about it, as though nuclear attack were akin to pressing the soft flesh of a...

After pulling a score from the dumpster 
behind Krogers I stroll through 
sliding doors with egg-caked hands. 
The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan 
the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint