I drag myself from bed with a magazine of white smiles clamped beneath my elbow, and I’m almost alive in the ruined hallway. Mold dots the floorboards; the ceiling’s splotched gray from water leakage—It’s old markings, our landlord said, Call me if the spots spread. . . .
Read moreSure, it’s all Chekhov this and Chekhov that,
and I am far from the only one
to keep myself up at night
thinking about his gun,
but the man was a dreamboat,
gray eyes and smirking beard
and lips—those lips. . . .
for Herb Creecy
Ten years ago I drove down to Barnesville
to see my friend, the artist Herb Creecy,
who was dying of pancreatic cancer.
He chose this way to end up: No hospital. . . .
What matters most is private and vast and can’t be seen
on the brain scan, though it may burn orange or blue
or a toasty gold in the amygdala,
a magnolia-green in the cingulum, the cinnamon
or burnt wine of an old tin roof all through the fornix. . . .
“You dork!” my sister shouted the day I called to tell her
I thought I might be pregnant. “Haven’t you checked
yet? Go to the pharmacy and call me back! Sheesh.”
1. FOLK ACOUSTICS
When we were in elementary school, . . .
Read more Oil has seeped into
the margins of the ditch of standing water
and flashes or looks upward brokenly,
like bits of mirror—no, more blue than that:
like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.
—Elizabeth Bishop
How young were my boys when I moved them to a town, . . .
Read moreIf the trout died it would not be
as motionless as it is now,
in a current a man cannot
stand in and under which looser
stones go tumbling from their sockets.
Across its back it seems sunlight
is what’s swimming, . . .
Tibetan Plateau
My obsession with borders was born all at once in three different countries, depending on who you ask. I was in my early twenties, biking with a friend across the parched soda plains of the Askai Chin. For weeks we traversed this high-altitude wilderness, a land spread wide as wings, . . .
Read moreNot to worry. Each morning
after you kiss my cheek
and lock the door behind you,
leaving me alone with my body
and this house to walk it around in,
I’ve plenty to do. Monitoring
the meat defrosting on the counter, . . .
She stood at the window and watched me.
How long she had waited for me to wake up
I dared not ask, nor could she have answered,
her jaws woven shut by the undertaker’s twine,
a trade she knew well, having taught herself
black work by night in the attic, . . .