I should have left the sesame seed I dropped on the floor. Let birds fly in through the hole in my roof to get it. The hole I love to watch the rain rain through. A blackbird visited this morning, wanting scones and oolong tea. Stinking the sick breath of …

On winter’s long red-eye out of Anchorage, small lamps near the floor made a grainy blurry everything, which meant awake, then almost, then heads slipping back or to the side, mouths jarred open. There are words bodies vanish to–curved, slumped, relaxed, released. And a sound, not the underwater lament of …

Looking across a conference room table, the fish on the lake has been stripped of its skin. The gulls, and the smell of the mud—it’s a moment so anti-aging, locked   in the moment. I think of not being good at preparation. The oil is still in the lawn- mower’s …

This is not a love letter.  This doesn’t end with me touching your small breasts, or looking into your hazel-shifting-green, depending-on-the-day-hazel eye. This doesn’t end with me holding you close while I hear the rise of your sleeping rib.   This just isn’t a love poem, not what you think, …

Before social studies on Thursday, a boy stands at a chalkboard spreading an equation full of symbols that to my non-mathematical eye look pulled from a dream. He left lunch early. He’s killing time.   Variable calculus, he says, a magician in need of very little banter. He’s engaged with …

Shaken from my bed, I arise to see a blood orange moon stuck between two steel arms of electricity’s skeleton.   Ducks in rippling water chatter nervously, as if looking for the one who stirred their pool.   China cups in place, I wonder if someone from the other side …

They came out of the old America, He knew the sounds of the saloon above which he was born, the rise of raucous laughter lifted by barley and hops, the sight of late afternoon sun slanting through the window coming to lie down on floorboards. She knew the beat of …

It is a holding back, an enormous force, it coils with dreadful tension, this taut spring of my voice. I mind the cup of each ear, how it gathers air, how the molecules vibrate and bubble down into the soft tissue of my brain. Receptive, I think, but the push …