Vol. 6, No. 1 Contents

And then, after six years, she saw him again.

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply.

And after all the weather was ideal.

As a rule, I'm an intuitive and exploratory poet. I'm interested in the discovery…

Yeats found patterns in the rhythm of a place, changes in pitch,            the boat is a song—it is locations.

   the caw sharp

as an eclipse, cuts

        deft arcs, opens up…

I pried myself

from chaos here.

We are things like trees or dogs.

I ruined us. I thought

me a bottle gentian, you a bumblebee.

Instead we competed.

Goodbye mutualism, I said, goodbye symbiosis.

All I think is watch the I

and the I takes over. I'm so sick

of branches equal limbs

equal my legs and arms…

& if he died I would hold love

in the cracks below the heart, a caged

hand waiting to enfold its animal…

Perhaps today's wind will release sheep onto a mountain you love…

the man empties his angel, meets a worn version of his daughter's face…

            Postcards from Eugene

suggestive of definition

                        fate, an odor

from the table beside me…

Never a lover

            I kept you

in the feretory of my heart

alongside other relics…

admission meaning death

at the hands we love…

Your mother calls on what would have been your 24th birthday. Yanking each word from the flowerbed of her gut…

It would be much simpler

to sleep with a composition of wheat.

Near dreaming horses.

TV ads for new trucks

more horsepower, more durability, more torque.

a stranger, a near stranger…

For my calling I crawl,

vermin-like, through a glade with a battalion of burnt

tanks, their guns every which-way, matchsticks.

Stayed two nights in Yuma

with Paul and Marie. A good rest.

500 miles today.

We're heading south

toward the border, but snow

keeps following us.

And all hours long, the town

  Roars like a beast in a cave…

  On that day

I shall put roses on roses, and cover your grave

With multitude of white roses…

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

…everything abstract that made you intransitive

lovely Frankenstein.

A creature without distance…

                                    it's the soap again

slipping out the window

                        pigeon-holed an antonym

            of clean; what do you

                                    cling to…

The little mouse has claimed the kitchen, spread out like a rind,

and under the cedar beam is you: a tent, sturdy as that—with people through the slit

that mimics a shy face in profile

determined not to full-on.

In summer, I remember where I'm from and why

my knees smell like yellow onions—

why you, Erin, are standing in my living room

straddling your brother's outgrown Huffy—

you want me back in the cul-de-sac badlands.

If I had a fedora's

starched heart I'd stir a horn in the streets

to announce our bourgeois surrender.

There is a mother that loves you

despite the sum of your parts.

She really is hefting gravel and gravel

just to heft gravel.

She can only imagine cars

on the highway. Thinks they must glint like boats

on a blue harbor. She can only imagine boats

on a blue harbor.