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When we wake up, the five windows and the French door are full of light.

My daughter swallows arrows of sunlight on her way to the grave.

I found a lodestone & I went to the creek & I buried it in the creek bed

My world must not be made of brief encounters along the neat squares.

A branch breaks and the body lands the wrong way. Snapping is easy.

His name is Lloyd. He lives on Percival. He’s super creepy.

Barbra Nightingale

A poetry of texture and light runs through these photographs.

She whispers all these rocks burning up in the sky can’t be a good thing.

He was getting a divorce. I was married with two teenage children.

A field. No clouds. Tall grasses bend toward the foreground.

“Pick your switch,” says my father and I’m stepping out into the forest.

The fish’s eye is mangled, tugged inward; blood leaks from its gills.

I didn’t want to start a poem with night where there should be a name.

We’d open our mouths and sink, trying to make an ocean of ourselves.

We were both up there smoking weed and axle grease, blinded.

I see now that motherhood is not required to speak a mother tongue.

His mooseness was implacable, the light behind him from the trees.

Oar blades, vast swirls of cirrus at dawn. The dead move within us.

All of this leaves me floating in seas of prehistory and indeterminacy.

money gotten by blood tends to stay in the blood, which has no race.

Something basks and gathers in the dark parts of an open ear.

Of what use, other than to the butterfly, are a butterfly’s wings?

All those butterflies I impaled when I was a boy—will I go to hell for that?

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

The transformation of their maid from shadow to sexpot thrills Maizie.

We’ve seen a lot of smaller ranches bought up by outside money.

Better to be a bird without altitude. Or to get out of the game early.

I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.

I eat what’s in front of me, as all great men do. Some wouldn’t, but I do.