Category: Poetry

I gather elderberries by the river. Last year, these purple-black fruits rotted on my counter – I was in the ER, clenched with pain and cold under ten blankets and by the time they opened me there was a liter of blood to take, one slender branch and th … Continue Reading

Cool like the Virginia waterfalls his eyes undressed her and yet, his stiff smile demanded such reverence from her. Rust-gold like the hawkweeds of summer, his eyelashes, cast fringed shadows on his cheeks whenever he closed his eyes… freckles floati … Continue Reading

(from the Summer of Three Foxes) It is easier to boil water than it is to freeze it. It is easier to write a poem, pay a bill, open a can of tuna, or peel a beet, than it is to read a book that has sat too long on the kitchen table. A sandwich is a poo … Continue Reading

(after Pablo Neruda) and it happens that I am tired of beauty shops. The smell of hair dye makes me break into hives, a sort of hysteria. Hysteria is an old-fashioned, Freudian word. Freud is out-of-fashion, and that is a relief. I want fashion to be o … Continue Reading

Now I will never go to the tern colonies where I learned to spot nests in the sand and collect chicks for you to band swiftly, noting their sex and type: Common or Arctic or Least. You blew on their bellies with a straw to show there are no feathers th … Continue Reading

The children ignore you submissively waiting in place in the sunny kitchen. They skip past you, an ornament in a bowl. The father, on the other hand, from the instant he lays eyes on you, leers hungrily at your buxom figure and blushing skin. He would … Continue Reading

Speck of cheese, dot of bread, slivered hint of once pie. They stir up our hunger, send a flare down desire’s dark hole, invite us to rise up again from here. A crumb of bird humming contends, hungry, with the bee. Green-back glow and the long beak sne … Continue Reading

for the Founding Five of GCC Gender and Women’s Studies  One woman walking toward a rising sun, taking in more sights and sounds of earth, opening to new sensations free from fear Five women reaching toward a whole new world, when equity in arts and sc … Continue Reading

Dusk after sultry dusk you brood in the window ‘For the air’ you say but we both know It’s for the darkness. You flash to the thundercrack of my horses My arm hard across your stomach wrenching you breathless All the way down. Your mother wept for your … Continue Reading

Once she lived in Arizona and she got an award, so her mother sent her an azalea. It was pink                   and pretty, so out of place in the apartment of nubby beige and ochre chair covers,                   cigarette smoke, monsoon grit. All her … Continue Reading

What beautiful eyes you have. Look how gorgeous you are. Do you have a boyfriend? Oh, you’ll be a heartbreaker. Little girl grew up surrounded by praise, Words that kept her warm, even on rainy days. Looking in the mirror, she saw what they did, A beau … Continue Reading

I’m contemplating the height of your window and the thickness of the skin on the inside wall of your thumb. I cannot quite place the growth of your smile as it expands over rocky valleys and causes fossils to be reborn. I am swimming in a pool of jelly … Continue Reading