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Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.                 —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Tame me—you whom I can never see— ——-each word I utter, each prayer I kneel for. Here I am, pacing—now wrest from me ——-a new song to find its way to you. If you…

From cramped to roofless ——-I became—I don’t know how— ————–an open-air temple with no pillars. My walls of stone, lichen-covered, where many feet came to pray. ——-The willows shook around me ————–as mice and small insects knelt in moonlight, I could feel the breath of many spirits ——-winging through my chamber: ————–rabbis dropping pocket lint—…

The thing I did for sorrow was silence. The thing I did for sorrow, the thing I did, the silence. I thought when replacing the pillow under the sleeping girl’s head it’s been a while since kindness. When my mother was sick I didn’t go I rolled over in my own bed I thought she…

With more persistent stitchery I might breach the red intelligence of berries taking French-knot shapes among embroidered leaves, or bring a spirit hovering in the satin-stitch of a hummingbird’s small throat; while outlining a dragonfly I may divine its mythic origin in dragon—fiery, winged, then tricked into an insect’s form, but keeping flashes of the…

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…

Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

The knife was held like night— quiet in her husband’s hand. In silence, the umbilicus was snipped. The moon went on shining. A mare leapt astride a stallion. Jerusalem was drowning. A match dropped. Hay fired. Kings slunk away. The world hung heavy on her breast. —Love’s foundling. A curtain twitched: unholy neighbors. A nosey…

Earth Science by Sarah Green (421 Atlanta Press, 2016) Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin ——(Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2016) The End of Pink by Kathryn Buernberger (BOA Editions, 2016) I WAS STARTING A THIRD UNIVERSITY DEGREE related to poetry when I first began hearing the expression “life of…

LURLENE MCDANIEL KEPT ME COMPANY in the hospital. Her young adult novels—which included Six Months to Live, I Want to Live, So Much to Live For, I’ll Be Seeing You, A Season for Goodbye, Sixteen and Dying, and Someone Dies, Someone Lives—featured stories of teenage love for the terminally ill. I was not terminally ill,…