When my father was seventy-four and I was no longer a girl that cowered, skirting the edge of the room, I asked him to travel back to his childhood, the landscape he’d banished for years. He became an Amish boy in suspenders, hitching the horse to the buggy, driving Delaware’s back country roads past the
Some women resist ruin for three thousand years. The wrecking ball smashes the front closet and hall but they just keep humming and dusting the knick-knacks. Lot’s wife disobeyed, turned and looked back at what was forbidden, now she’s afraid to risk any tears, four could dissolve a salt pillar. I watched a woman sell
I cast my bread on the waters, what I’d wanted and loved shuffled off on a raft, waved, promised to call then never looked back. Sometimes grief braids a rope, crafts a cage or a prison. I set the last brick, found a noose coiled round my neck. What could I do but build a
He conjured up a crow and sent it like a curse, cloaked in black, raven-lit, it settled on her shoulder. Who could have guessed a crow could save, it stole the poisoned bread. Now when ravens strut she counts their raucous throats as gifts that forced a turn, her winter heart borrows light, just like
All night the rain fell softly and slow, the sound on the roof, on the pond, on the fields falls on the memory, burning— but gentle the rain that quenches the night, that cleanses the ash in my mouth so that I wake to the wind in the cottonwood trees, the glittering silver-green leaves and
for Norma When I arrived at her door, she called from her chair, Don’t take off your shoes— but I did out of habit, sinking into the couch, bewildered with half-finished poems—mostly, she let them walk into the dark but one time she said, A poem wants life. I’d stand beneath cottonwood trees, listening to
