Look, I said, I ’d love a revolver, love to bother the silence
with my aim: hole a target. It’s like bowling but with
a more fearful invention. It’s fun, haven’t you ever
shot one? This, my …
The first time I left home was before I was born.
I was barely formed. A scrap. A sample, at best.
I was more my mother than me, then,
I think. We can’t remember.
The plane lifted my mother’s
body …
Praise for the porchbed is praise for SLEEP.
Wrapped in cricket and cicada-sound sleep.
Rapt in rain sleep. Worry and all-trouble erasing
sleep. Smoothed-out sleep.
Counting sheep and Bo Peep sleep.
One two three four five six seven
sleep and …
Before they took Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, the British described it as a “barren rock with hardly a house upon it.” Now it is a place of tremendous height and stone, worthy of Sisyphus’s fruitless toil. The colonial …
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Among the Losses
My lamentations have shaken loose locusts.
They whir in the burned-out nave of my body.
In the shower, whole decades wash from my body.
A girl’s hairless limbs emerge naked from the spray.
A small city disappears in
the near-sighted dusk of a coastal winter.
Someone is walking home as I once did.
Someone is thinking as I did once
this is their neighborhood, their consolation.
Once I thought words could describe
In memory of Callie Barr, known in historical record
as caretaker of William Faulkner’s family
You may find her behind
Rowan Oak, a shadow
of fortress where then now
you find no real entry place.
Where then
He listened, very well.
He could not help himself.
Every sound he heard he remembered,
Making a great library of music inside himself.
He didn’t mean to, but could not help himself.
A sound asks for attention,
Was it the voice you feared, or its shadow?
Did you long for His touch or was suffering enough for you
to know He was there?
Do you resent my juvenile hungers?
Do you wish for me the freedom
