Category: Work life
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Atonement
The winter was kind to the day lilies and goats weed this year. They burst wild showing off ambitious new roots. It was less kind to that little hinoki I transplanted in September. Alas, reckoning begins. I pluck it from the soil. Birds flit seeds where they may, freeze lines rise, fall, encroach, the sun…
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Girl with father in emergency room, 1983
This is the dance we made together, when justice broke open on our laps. How we spun that night — me shifting, you spilling, our learning together that wild-beating fear — boiled as one into a speck, set to carve our way through years, to now, and on. As the stars rise through the night,…
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Mortal girl
She swings along moontide they say and opens up sunshine, pulls out every bit of air for every frozen breath on earth her plastic feet march her down all the lonely dreams they say, knocking on doors of the empty five and dimes asking, ’Wher’d’yuh go?’ and ‘Huh?’ and they say, ’It’s a miracle! Look,…
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Clarity
I cannot say it all started that night but that is when it became clear: dark, full, swelling wounds of inobvious origin bursting their seams, flying upon us all. This is not the thing we are meant for, not what we read in stories of educated ladies eating yogurt and bagels, drinking coffee in earnest…
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Prayer
(upon learning of a friend’s violent death) i allow me to pause to rearrange my heart, its sinews, tissue, the rhythm it takes while I walk this street now, all making way for a new configuration you being gone in an instant, in the heat of that strangling hour give me some time yet to…
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Stopping by lakefront on my way home
I always think it’s aspens here but maybe it’s cottonwoods you can’t really tell unless the seeds are falling and we are way past that now. Between the leaves flipping and knocking in the wild rush off the lake and the pounding of the archers on their targets behind you an odd space opens for…
Poems from in between 