Poetry

You can go down for a jouk, I want to say, a gander 
at the greylags on the green
that’s not so much a field as a grassy space 
where the flats once stood.

a line between the wild and settled regions /
the colored band around heraldic shields
the seam / rim / edge / periphery / the margin brink or limit /

I was daubing s onto our front step with the blood and guts of clover mites
when Speccy Rab headbutted BA—which didn’t end well for Rab’s glasses.

If hunted for oil, hunted for light.

After the terror, the whales swarmed.

In the evenings, we watched Jeopardy. 
Wore surgical masks once she got sick.
Before that my mother sent me to the store
for cigarettes all the time. Pack of Salem Lights.

Of birdsongs, I know only three
for certain: cardinal, blue jay, raven,
though perhaps the last two
don’t count—not as song. More call
than song.  More cry, by which I mean

I wore the face of the animal to lure the animal into shooting range.

This was symmetry. 

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...