Category: Poetry

Sangha 10/2024 I used to think of you as the flame, and me as the moth. A moth, though not as magnificent, is stronger than the butterfly. No gossamer wings or tiny antennae, nocturnal moths are awake when it’s dark. I flew...

The osprey watches nested atop her wooden pole. Kaleidoscope eye tumbles toads passenger train, forest vole in the jeweled fragments of her gaze. Such busy, still days. Come dusk she flicks a perfectly feathered wing. Sky,...

The sprightly dog who leads the rotund man on their daily walk is gone. So is his master. I’ve been away for weeks. I return to my familiar world reassembling itself — a well-used jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece,...

He was running, running, chancing open fields up from the pond, moving without the constraint of human witness, so all the Fall he went leaping over our streams, bounding higher than any dancer’s dreams, risking high brush until...

After our prom After we fooled around At the drive-in Thirty years later My girlfriend Lost her breasts To cancer – survived Then drove a bulldozer And mixed and poured her Own concrete driveway More recently My daughter (Child...

After chip beef Gravy over toast Television then Green Eggs and Ham One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish Dad snapped Off the lamp And my terror Of the night began I was certain The darkness Created ogres That would devour My...

You’re blind-folded, driving the old truck headed toward No Name Lake on the gravel road. You’re picking up speed, stones pinging off the frame, but it’s been a good truck, so you think it will probably make it. What does that...

Sometimes when I face-time with my toddler grandchildren, I have this urge to pierce a hole in their psyche— just to know what emotions flood their universe, which they’ve not yet collected a vocabulary to express. There is so...

She left her boyfriend of two years, borrowed two dollars hopped on the tracks— destination nowhere. Backpack in overhead with a change of nothing. In front of her, a tray of condiments and not a penny for a drink. She only told...

After dark, when I was fifteen my jean pockets full of coins for phone booths, class-enclosed, metal-framed with rust and dust, and fingerprints marking the years. In the slots, I slipped my quarters dropping like silver...