Poetry

Sling Shot

♦
Fall 2014 ♦
Chalk dust. Is returning really so simple? From the hallway, he can see through the open door of the abandoned classroom, through its far window, and out into the hay fields that lay beyond. There is a single bale rotting against the fence. They would stack them, he remembered, build forts…
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The Apple

♦
Fall 2014 ♦
People drank the apples          John “Appleseed” Chapman planted       during his Ohio migration to Marietta by catamaran          his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of            Prohibition before the Women’s           Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider            …
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Waiting for the Invasion

♦
Fall 2014 ♦
In other years I watched the sky for birds flying south in formation. This year they pass in unbroken lines through my sleep, driven down on machine wings. I know the voice you use for telling children not to fear every droning sound that scatters their play like shrapnel or…
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Telephone

♦
Summer 2014 ♦
I. An appendage of my stepdaughter’s hand, pink as the tongue it has muted. Even as she sleeps it snores gently in her loosened grasp. All day her thumbs tap coded words across the screen, her eyes alive in its light. II. In my mother’s hand, another riddle she once…
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Battlefield

♦
Spring 2014 ♦
Mid-October, and around the rocks of Devil’s Den legions of cabbage white butterflies march in wild disorder, like scattered clouds of ashes in the late-day light. Under the blank staring eyes of bronze generals we negotiate winding dirt paths among boulders encrusted with shapeless patches like grey-green lace: when I…
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The Creek

♦
Winter 2014 ♦
My brother barefoot in its grey thread, in his hands the small fish hooked out, fluttering like a loose paint chip. A jar of crawdads to carry home sat on the bank. We’d watch them for a day until the tiny albino shapes would hang shiftless in the water like…
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Translation

♦
Winter 2014 ♦
for Loyal Jones So I came out of my rainy bower covered with white petals dropped from a tree. My people long ago whose milky eyes I still can see would have said I had a God’s plenty of petals on me, an expression I liked to hear as a…
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