snow was our first church a congregation turned store of common opinion like an after- supper prayer in each rich ear | Continue reading
What you lose that someone else finds:a note slipped into a fold in the cloth of time; another that slipped your mind.Not the first time you feel as if blind,flightless as a domesticated silk moth. But what you lose, someone else finds—Luck had nothing to do with your state of mi … | Continue reading
I sat all morning alone with the ice of time a clock thinking me kindred being led by the nose by my business | Continue reading
Relief at finding a bathroom She says she feels almost like a new person If we are always tethered to some idea or state when are we most ourselves Pauses show how silence is a palimpsest of meanings The instability of surfaces and intentions At the end we are rendered into pulp … | Continue reading
Bodies of water with a menace of teethbeneath the surface. Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest a longing for taxonomy— How to remember origins, where we began. Trace them back to the root.And farther back,past the level of groundwater—where there's less evaporation in deepe … | Continue reading
in a hard world I was ready to cry but say nothing a draft of a new wind is not always neat given gray snow in a homeward street like the most ordinary trouble becoming delight | Continue reading
The story is that an eagle mistook Aeschylus' bald head for a rock, and dropped a tortoise upon it. Did it shatter his skull or givehim a giant concussion? In any case,he was supposed to have died instantly. Aeschylus, described as the father of tragedy, wrote: He who learns must … | Continue reading
setting out after dinner night in my ear on both sides a rat | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
"US Mint presses final pennies as production ends after more than 230 years." - Associated Press, 12 Nov. 2025Penny wise, pound foolish; earner of an honest pennyyet you swear you don't have a penny to your name. Won't you buy hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny— too proud t … | Continue reading
anger is building an office in my chest out of lies and discontent I am in a quandary whether to burn or to sleep with a troubled word | Continue reading
who would put servant into my head I last a day one eon for a fly learning to dance to a tedious sermon an absence in the country of tomorrow | Continue reading
—by which we mean something we thought impossible, unreeling before our eyes. The days too bright, the nights either too quiet or exploding with earthquake debris and the bombast of helicopterraids. Parents and children torn from each others' arms. Thenthey disappear. How many ti … | Continue reading
It let us nurse itindoors— too weak to move muchwith a ragged wing,unable to push itselfor its brilliant sails upright.We fed it sugarwater and small pulp of fruit,lined a tray with leaves.One day, one night, not trembling.Then sunlight. Then halting flight. | Continue reading
ice beginning to lie till noon the little men of night go mining scar the unother through negligence | Continue reading
In my hometown, a lady dressed all in white walks the streets at night, looking to hitch a ride. Another rises into the air on the updraft from her parasol wings. We also have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, thousands of nature spirits. They don't all live in one place, like th … | Continue reading
a walk becomes a country in the story of the hand kept in pocket after the work of the house is done this sudden grief | Continue reading
where the papers must go to war I go to a little private door in a wall through a narrow place and into a box real as the Lord's own Lord | Continue reading
It must have been dashedby the wind against the frontsteps, which is where I found it: on its back, wings limply outspread (one witha ragged tip). I took it insideand laid it on a sunflower-shapedsaucer, which my daughter painted some years ago at Color Me Mine. I wasn't sure it … | Continue reading
My student shows pictures of two shapes on a slide: one spiky and shuriken-like, a ninja star that might be used as distraction, to inflict poison or a minor wound. The other has juicy, rounded edges, somewhat resembling the poppy which is the signature of a famous Finnish design … | Continue reading
up and down the same lie night papers every day like snow in the heart | Continue reading
of the oldest church on Bantayan island.It was built in 1839, in Spanish times,with coral-flecked stones that localfishermen mortared with a paste of lime,water, sand, and egg whites. This has always been a country of calamities both natural and human-made: every typhoon a dervis … | Continue reading
over God the sweet ink of a loving night under God I find myself in the loyal dirt under God I get high out of my mind | Continue reading
going out to fall together in a play we dream a never- again life dancing so far so full I forgot the way | Continue reading
The test is painless, takes about 15 minutes. X-rays will measure the level of calcium and minerals in a section of bone— the lowerspine, the femur, the forearm. In general,higher mineral content means stronger bonesless prone to fracture. My grandmother slippedand fell from a mi … | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
The little food delivery robot pauseson the corner of campus to cross the street. Its body is a white rectangular box the size of a child's toy wagon. It has a lid that locks, ultrasonic sensors, a curb-climbing system,a message flag. Czech writer Karel Čapek's 1920 science ficti … | Continue reading
a rogue as unquiet as a rose never a prayer never a hat off to joy the mind I found in my mind | Continue reading
They start talking about who they werebefore they became what they are today.They say they feel so lucky to have made itout, given how life is terrible there today.There are no more trees on the hillsides;only new construction everywhere today.And the graft! The corruption! Even … | Continue reading
my hands all morning meet to put things in order grow to be a company with great hope like the lord and lady of a nothing little town | Continue reading
A child, soaked to the skin, clears a stopped drain on his street until water can flow at last.The eye of another storm hovers above the coast,yet no one has been raptured yet/at last. But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spuncandied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last. … | Continue reading
is the company taking away rest night by night safe to hate? the dead float on the water nobody to bury us | Continue reading
'There are enough microplastics in your brain to make an entire spoon' | Continue reading
"Who trusts a mouth that does not abandonitself/ to...ripeness?" - Albert AbonadoYes, too much salt billows in the blood.Too much sugar hardens the kidneys into clappers. Too much fat hoistssandbags to the rafters, from where they will drop one day soon on your feet. Too much bil … | Continue reading
the blue places above me in an opera of the now play sun together having no mind to end | Continue reading
Her speech is flawless, though brokenoccasionally with tears. The camera doesn't capture everything, but you can see behind the podium she's in a well-pressed school uniform. White blouse under navy blazer. Perhaps she's wearing a pleated skirt in the same color; black shoes, whi … | Continue reading
Nevertheless, walk with the audacityof a white man, says my therapist.Walk with the audacity of someonewho knows what they want, the antbent on lugging the sugar it collected by itself, all the way home. | Continue reading
at our age now down to letters we remember one another you who had a need to go out of her mind and that one walk I took to the cheese- cake house | Continue reading
It's time to clean up the edges,pull up the overgrowth, yankthe weeds away from the fence;to turn and level the soil.I don't have the knack that the neighbors do for clearing their yardsof every dry pine conealmost as if at the exact moment the trees pelt them down;for using thei … | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
the wreck and not the story of the wreck Adrienne Rich Growing old under capitalism, we learn again and again how foolish we are to allow ourselves to become attached to any particular place. All will be destroyed for short-term profits. The kids who grew up playing in the creek … | Continue reading
all our business is art we re-make the world out of other things and heat it up | Continue reading
Spring is a profusion of white—flowers of winter solitude, thawing on the branch. How do I know it's safe to bring my loneliness out into the greenair? The stone angel by the church door lifts a fluted clamshell in his hands.Water has pooled there, overnight. | Continue reading
a black suit his hand on my shoulder as we seat ourselves in the void which begins to be a garden with nothing in it | Continue reading
Here you are, cast once again in the roleof the afflicted— in somestories, you spinsomething coarse into gold.In others, you count the uncountable— a drivewaypooling with gravel, a trayof mixed seed to separateby color and size. Mostly you have no quarrel with the material— grain … | Continue reading
all morning in the mine for an ounce of night a copy of my mind as an upper bed | Continue reading
Once, buying a pair of kitten-heeled pumps as a gift for my mother (she'd walked past the store window more than once to admire them), myfather tucked a peso bill into each toe box. Though I didn't quite understand how this rendered the gift, even if gift, more than just a thing- … | Continue reading