Alchemy Practicum and Goat Visit
Goat, you were the only one among the three goats who pressed his head against the fence when Rachel and I came to you after picking crab apples and black walnuts. I returned to the paradise of childhood labors...
residual heat
Residual Heat at the Decommissioned Synchrotron
We step over fading caution tape, a Geiger counter in your hand ticking the steady tick of background radiation. Up and down the textured metal stairs...
Fire Danger: High
But you burn, and I know it.
Adrienne Rich, “Orion”
As we wind up the Berkley hills, brown foam
peels off the dash of his hot Dodge Dart.
I crank down the windows for a sun-singed draft…
How the War Started
When Xerxes wrote again: “Deliver up your arms,” Leonidas wrote back: “Come and take them.”
Black eye. The left one. Stubble. Leather jacket and underneath
a black t-shirt with “Fuck You” printed in white. Buckled boots.
The Longfellow Bridge
The T runs down the heart of the bridge. The cars shake in the dim light left by the dregs of the day...
Airplanes Over the Bog
Bagno. The name means bog. The village may have been a bog before the drainage ditches gridded it into kolkhoz...
Like Two Dogs Dancing
He turns into the comforter of rain, no umbrella or hat, just the quilted sidewalk. The spume from wheels passing...
[Content warning: animal death]
The Wandering Daughter Returns to Her Neglected Patrimony
From the half-finished bunker of the concrete basement That was to be the foundation of our now-abandoned Familial abode that I will neither finish nor furnish...
Grudzień
The tall, even pines
with sand at their feet
brood black between their trunks...
In the Park with Grandmother, Olsztyn, Poland 1981
The hard blue sky behind her
run through with a single white thread
of a contrail...