there’s a hill of self-help books, secondhand. There’s a tower of tomes that tried to get rich quick, signed by the author, never read.   Who trussed a cookbook with […]

Into the birdbath’s frozen mirror, you stare down a nose of red clay as if—past mossy five o’clock-shadow, your curls under snow— you can’t see someone just carved from marble, […]

God lay down in the one cool spot of the hall the bell had emptied like a church. Down He lay, one eye closed, one keeping watch, for we had […]

Five in the morning, the first light milky this far north. And that first glint of gold— would you say coins scattered on palace grounds? No, it is just a […]

A ragged regiment of leeks was left to guard the plot. Green soldiers leaning like drunks on air so cold it felt solid, they turned their backs on the bones […]

Horrible light and very short sittings— the portrait of the Old Gentleman, who looks like a medieval saint, will take longer than I thought. So here I am at the […]

I The natives wear bits of horn about their necks and affirm they derive from a beast that, coming to the river to drink, puts its singular horn into the […]

Poem written so long ago I didn’t know I was a poet, your words fell in the desert of childhood, downwind from the reactor. Like what little rain reached that […]

was just a room past the edge of Pasco, at Sacajawea State Park. The desert glared at me from the window. The Snake River glinted like obsidian. The walls bristled […]