A Chastisement of Deer
By Poetry Issue 71
In the white of the yard the snow provides, they arrived, making form seem careless dream while they fed. From their sentences (like guides) I know they swung back hoof to front, to seem to letter selves through white in slow confessions. I want to know the faith they’re lurching toward. Something like faith in…
Read MoreLetter VII from the Western Coast of the British Isles to a Hermit Monk of the Thebaïd, Egypt, Sixth Century
By Poetry Issue 77
I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…
Read MoreAbsence Blooming
By Poetry Issue 80
This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…
Read MoreHow Long the Long Winter
By Poetry Issue 85
Awake in the middle of the night, the river cracked with language, the ice of it a heave of squares and oblongs. Only the waterfall, its cold spray frosting nearby juts of stone with lace, continued to tumble as if it would never cease to move and be. Once it was, we lay down together,…
Read MoreSometimes I Am Permitted
By Poetry Issue 81
for Connor Stratman How winter keeps us warm now: the anesthetic snow sifting from its anesthetic sky. A man hocks spit in the alley for each day’s white on white, but we both live on the red line, we are both still waiting on this train. Because my sins are those of digression, or…
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