The forecast had not predicted it,and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk
and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger
With a squeal, the alreadyotherworldly broadcaststuttered,scattered,leavingonly a tattered hiss.
In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibitedclosed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,
reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.
In the morning we found40 acres of oakstorn to the ground.
And for his human guests, imperial excess strainingall credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honeyand stuffed in a swan […]
The Plat Book
cast our farmand neighbors’farms as flat […]
We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watchedthe belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of fleshthrough darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.
If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not poetry? Quick, somebody tell Shakespeare.
Two VQR contributors are interviewed for “American Experience.”
You were afraid to open, but when you did,
There she was asking to borrow a candle.