Explore

The Rock

She had a situation where she’d lost her driver’s license for speeding.

The Saltcutter’s Wife

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

The Saturday Morning Institute of Human Survival

The first time the world demanded more of me, I was twenty-nine.

The Sentimentality of William Tavener

It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.

The Session

Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.

The Silence Here Owns Everything

When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.

The Sinkhole

The tomatoes weren’t there. She looked again at the ground.

The Strength of Fields

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

The Swallow

Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.

The Sweater

I hold out hands, empty and poor like a beggar by the temple door.

The Vaccination

The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.

The Vanishing

He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.

The Visiting Room

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

The Visitor

“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”

The Well Diggers

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

The Wilderness around Us and Other Poems

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.

The Women

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

The Writer

He came into town with his big red pen and began revising us.

The Writer in the Family

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

Theory of Everything and Other Poems

My books, I can hardly read them, they make so much sense.

Thirteen Months Unemployed

They are glorious pumpkin-skinned messengers. I hate them.

This Flesh, This Ghost

And that girls came to his house all the time, cheap girls from the docks.

This Is How It Goes

Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.

This Place We Call Home

Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.

This Summer

Hear the voice of life telling you something from the inside out.

Three Poems

Let’s walk down to the river, bless the paper boats and turn it all into wine.

Three Poems

Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.

Three Poems

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

Three Poems

She regarded the world calmly without the filter of her suffering.

Three Poems

Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.