More on: Tara Bray

1. A patch of nothing the size of a nickel above the nape, smooth moon, the beginning of myth, the spread of skin and each morning’s sheddings at the feet, each little swirl, a parable, unblessed.  2. Forced to lose the one crow-shined feature I’d been allowed, each week another round found, spots, pale and…

like a slap, like a bone, like a spice, like a thought gone still in the light, another kind of sorrow, a kind of life, a cheek stroked, then freckled. Its rhythm amounts to injury, to a small space. No singing. Just a sack of air, a soiled shirt, more sermonizing that picks away at…

Like a dark miracle, they sleep, two am at a truck stop outside Indianapolis; my husband of three cities, three years— flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; our baby daughter, little chickadee, pale wrinkle, my inkling. A motherless girl who now mothers, I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses of the afterlife, two clear-wing butterflies, two…

sphere of pillowed sky one faceless gathering of blue shyly, I want to sit by you but don’t old globe come home a blue-soft let near the cheek dozer, I’m tethered, and devoted to your raw and lonely bloom my lavish need to drink your world of crowded cups to fill.

From my car I watched with dread the woman who had raged at the meeting, condemned us all, heading toward the car I’d nicked on the way in. My daughter hiding in the back, “I’m scared” coming from the balled-up shape of her. Trembling a bit myself, I got out of my car as the…