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The house my mother grew up in burnt down in ’85. I hope y’all never experience something like that—losing everything, Mom told my brothers and me when we were too young to understand.

What damage do I do? / The night avoids my eyes, so does the road. / I am never wholly myself, unto myself.

Able only to recall / his parting footsteps—the chipping away at / a tree one fells at last

He was doing the dishes, midmorning, when he noticed the white car drive by, and drive by again. A quiet street, on the way to nowhere. At eleven, the school bus would show up, to deliver lunches to the children who couldn’t go to school...

If the summer of 2020 had a visual refrain, it was of statues coming down, the likes of Jefferson Davis and Christopher Columbus being sawed and pulled from plinths, dragged into rivers.

Before North took a seasonal job / fishing for kings in Alaska / I’d never admitted to myself / that he was my only friend.

Through the window, what light gives / new meaning in the day.

Nadia knows, when the mother leaves them, that they will die. They lurch from side to side, low on the ground, ears folded over into crinkled triangles. Claws soft, mouths brown with dirt, meowing in the damp soil of the flower bed.

Most of us are living in a landscape designed for the car. “These days, so much of urban planning is undoing the mistake of the recent past.”

Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just...