after John Singleton Copley
From the leather bench, legs swinging
a foot from the floor, she brings her gaze
to the shark: its hideous teeth, its misplaced
lips and mistaken shapes, the sinister
way its mass slips beneath the
Features
Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a grandmaw. In honor of her eleventh birthday, she was having a slumber party, but so far, only my best …
Read More
reliquary \ֽre-lə-ֽkwer-ē\ n. {Fr reliquaire, from ML reliquaiurium, from reliquia relic + Larium-ary—more at relic}: a casket, shrine, or container for keeping or exhibiting relics (remains, leavings, of a deceased person)
—Webster’s Third New International Unabridged
How did I become a very old poet, and a polemicist at that? In the Writer’s Chronicle of December 2010 I described myself as largely self-educated. In an era before creative writing classes became a staple of the college curriculum, …
Read More
Once in a while I gave up, and let myself
remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s
hips were set, the head of the femur which
rode, not shallow, not deep, in the socket
of the pelvis,
I came through Monarch Pass in Colorado, fifteen thousand feet high and fourteen miles out of the nearest town—I came through on a 650cc Triumph motorcycle about dusk dark in late September of 1958. It was snowing lightly. I was …
Read More
When that oriole whistled from the orchard
it seemed frankly to be asking, You got
a problem with that? Its orange and black
was brash as a high-school letter sweater.
No problem, no problem, except I saw
Saturday night
Sometimes the things dreamers do seem incomprehensible to others, and the world wonders why dreamers do not see the way others do.
—Queen Marie of Romania, at the dedication of the unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art, 1926
Eighty-eight …
Read More