Category: Poetry

Our canoe cuts smoothly through the water, our bent paddles propelling us forward. I’m in the bow, my husband in the stern, so I can’t see his face when he tells me how proud he is of me, of the battle I wage daily against my...

My husband roasts the fish whole, lemon slices arranged around the pan, and the meal comes out in courses the way we used to do it before we had a child: first a garlicky Caesar salad with homemade croutons, then avgolemono, a...

In the dim dusky light, their huge white bodies glide gracefully across the mirrorglass surface of the lake— one adult in front and one in back, with three adolescents in a row between them, gray and barely visible, the sun...

Passing sod fields on the way to school had me dreaming to fence it in with white boards, a square of grassy pasture for my not-yet horses. I’d play Legos with my brother in the basement and claim all the green plates perfect...

I’ve heard homesteaders talk about raising their children learning the life cycle, knowing where their food comes from, giving thanks for the animal’s sacrifice. But as I watch my three year-old stroke the feathers of a dead...

After my brother died, I started seeing Sandhill Cranes— or I started noticing them. They’d fly over my house, stand in a field as I drove past, or I’d hear their call on the wind. I don’t know which comes first— the thoughts of...

My aging parents feed all the birds the turkeys the deer the squirrels the rabbits. Dutifully filling the feeders and when that is not enough—sheet pans, pouring out cracked corn or birdseed. Today while swimming with my boys at...

A Bullsnake elegy He’s a paragon of rectitude. Like spiral time, he has no reverse gear. Agent provocateur, creature without guile, he turns up only when we least suspect. Emissary of innocence, a world without dimension, he’s a...

In noiseless passage through the quiet dawn a Barn Owl crossed beneath the drift of our groaning basket midnight’s muffled thief daybreak’s sated raptor patron of the desert’s edge rastering the woodland’s providential floor on...

Cetaceans glide along the gradients where planktons whorl and nightjars follow moth-light through the dark where hominids trail the moose and elk along their branching pathways strewn with sugars proteins enzymes fats the stuff...