Articles

“This is Fraternity
Island and contains
too few palms.
We shall plant
the sands and shade
our cabanas,”

I don’t know if it’s getting older, but as I and people around me experience more loss in our personal lives, I’ve been coming to a sense of the reality that life is shaped around loss—not despite it but because of it.

I keep my mouth shut.
If it weighs on me, good—
I’ll be mindful.

At sunrise the end will freeze me like a lake trout
preserved in vinegar,

You must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across.

I am Yours, Yours only, however time
might wear me away

My native leniency inside your rage
becomes itself a hellish surge, otherworldly.

From his balcony, the night sky is a portal to a pinhole
of other lives—some barely visible.

i. MANY PEOPLE DIE in the book of Genesis, and we are, for the most part, told where the bodies are buried. We know what happens to the corpses of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Joseph. We sometimes get details about the procurement of a burial plot or the reconciliation of estranged brothers…

God is a watering hole, I dreamed