Poetry

I want my web to hold. I want to repair
what I have made. I was not given the gold hive.
In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds. Spinning
my body inside of hairline emptiness, I project

There’s this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same

The Gold Codes are the launch codes the president must keep on his person to initiate a nuclear strike.

Nicknamed “the biscuit,” there’s something domestic about it, as though nuclear attack were akin to pressing the soft flesh of a...

After pulling a score from the dumpster 
behind Krogers I stroll through 
sliding doors with egg-caked hands. 
The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan 
the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint

There is no title. There is no title. The body is content. The body is window.
The body is container, curtain, chair, grid. Do you see? Bones & shoulders, a spine

No car to drive to the dump and too embarrassed 
to borrow one, you scrape the black mold 
off the underside as best you can, muscle it 
onto your shoulder. Spores multiplied to the size 

She died & I—
In the spring of her blood. I remember
my mother’s first injury. The surprise of unborn
petals curling light, red, around her wrist.

Sorting through the chest’s junk, I happened
on this picture of him, a stranger I lived with 
month-to-month while I looked for something

We had to present proof for everything:  
My mother was born 
August 31, 1954. On that day 
inside the womb of a minute 
she burst from another woman’s life, 

More dark than gray, but not yet quite dark
entirely, the stories keep ending as if there were
a limit to what any story could hold onto, and this
the limit, the latest version of it, looking a lot like the sea
meeting shore.