The Winter of Our Discontent Did Not Make It to Spring She did everything the doctors recommended—the chemo that blew her hair off, that...

Final For the final exam on hope somebody will write the answer with a fine stylus on a beetle’s shiny red back. Another will put her...

Echo We hear it from a dark, deep well, resounding year after year, century after century, even now, in the truth of art and the silence...

RED HORSE TRUANCY Boys who can’t play ball watch a donkey rise out of the lake, shake off his ragged, grey pelt. Red bells still around...

Pulp Toward Rumford, on the way to ultrasound my pelvis, I drive the banks of Androscoggin pass the desperate papermill. Pulp gas rises...

A note on the poems: Retelling can be a mug’s game, especially if one is retelling a great writer’s short stories by condensing them...

Unfinished The pulse of wing against my cheek Startled me from the book I was reading: A Book of Luminous Things. So quick and close it...

Loneliness 1. The splintered edges of the bark had already Turned brown and mottled where the kid’s ax Gashed the tree a month before,...

on doonerak time (journal entries, 1989) everyone fears something – joe the guide solstice sun yellow yoyo on a string circling mount...

Alter Ego When I go out, it had better sound like a murder of crows— those loud clanging bastards in my dooryard making a ruckus,...

skeumorphism ian and i walked out behind the house on that first day 1 or 2 of our supposed 55 acres there is a creek and bridge built i...

Signals The character I call I wants to thank the character who doesn’t exist who phoned in a dream to tell me what I must do with my...

Bindweed Fridays: Return to Sexual Purity says the sign at the church I used to pass three times a week on the way to the gym. Yeah, no,...

Solitary Confinement Villanelle They only want to teach you what cannot be taught. In the small room of endless winter light, solitary...

Two Women Walking two small women, walking. arms linked, talking. heads ear to ear. chuckling and exchanging small conspiracies, about...

The Great Liars You have to admire the great liars. You learn to paddle a canoe and they tell you how they once sailed around the Cape...

Autobiographobia I have a disease called autobiographobia. – Chekhov for Dave Jauss I am the orphan wrenched, like a slight arm from its...

Aphasia Poem 31 have you been in a field with the grass as tall as a child finally free during the august new moon night when first...

Meditation for a Chance Encounter During Isolation Meet yourself from the dream where you were scrambling, picking things up, or were you...

a man from Stockton killed a bear November 13, 1976, the paddock’s underside in white paint scrawl declares. You hadn’t been killed yet...