More on: Poetry

Painting by Phyllis Kriegel Stepping from the blackness and blood-red hollow of the tree —–she juggles—not one, but five ———————————-round apples. Beside her, Adam —–whirls clumsily in mid-air— ————————————-hips over head, arms and legs —–askew—as if he, too, had been tossed up into the blurring spiral. —————————–He tries to steady himself with a foot- like…

In Bossche’s The Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, we’re tied to a tree and worked with our own tools. They don’t know how a body works, but have heard people talk about pain. It hasn’t been autumn for a while. The trees are empty. The power lines hum. Others mill about, wait for something…

I want to be like a church, but I’m my father’s barn. Emptying my mind to the August lawn storm windows, burnt and mothen things, baling wire I found the pump organ I disassembled and left under a plastic tablecloth like someone I’d opened up only to abandon mid-surgery. She tried to teach me to…

I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left. ——————————————-Exodus 10:4–5 My daughter picks cicadas like apples from the tree. This one cracked up and that one is sleeping too high to reach. She…

pills before bed. Job swallows, spits, vomits in the sink. Pink bubbles foam then clog the drain. Job’s wife cleans what she can with a snake, unscrews the trap to scoop Job’s sins with a slotted spoon. So much slips through, the runs of cheap soup. She gives the best part of her day to…

i. The kitchen clock is timelessness, its tick like rain resuming on the windowpane, eventually making the driveway slick. It’s not God’s tears. It’s we who cry in vain. ii. We buy protective glasses to prepare. The sun will disappear: total eclipse. We’ll pack a picnic lunch, head south to stare at what we hope…

Not everything comes back. The rescue dog that bolted out the kitchen door (you joked he didn’t want salvation); memories of how it was before your father left (he said he wasn’t going far, his face expressionless, at least you thought it was); and even Jesus, all of us on earth still waiting here, praying.…

What makes the elegant trogon elegant? Makes us flock to the canyon lands of southeastern Arizona during nesting season for a glimpse of it perched, disinterested, on the branch of an oak or sycamore? Deep brown eyes circled by a thin line of tangerine on a downy black mask. A squat lemon yellow bill. Crown,…

As if the seahorse itself were not improbable enough, its near cousin the leafy seadragon is brilliant yellow with white stripes and long, green, leaf-like appendages trailing in branches from all over its body. Gossamer fins ripple along its back and neck as it floats calmly among the fronds of seaweed and seagrass it resembles,…

Stay for me still life, ceaseless tree, stay. Stay who stays the real, you root of mind, you constant mote. Pruned shoot, sealed board, beam of sudden come back for me, please. Wood you. Say. For me, last possible whole world, for wouldn’t-me still possible to believe, for place stay put, for fruit in fool,…