Articles

From the stem he pulled one—plucked, she thought, thinking of the better word. Not purple, but almost purple, as if fog had stuck to its skin

I  am  weary  of  my  own  death,  its  flagrant  hospitality,  the  stone  mug  in  which  it proffers the best cocoa. Photographs of obscure ancestors line its mantelpiece; bits of cut glass litter death’s settee. I have come here to exchange doves with my death, and already I am sick to the spleen of death, of doves.

There were bones everywhere, in the ground, resting on the surface, wedged in the crevices of trees, human bones, animal bones, bones of unimaginable beings, strange bones. So that could be the jawbone of an angel, you said: the spleen-bone, the miter-bone.

If you’re like me, you sewed and twisted your own bows onto that winter’s blue spruce, heated oil on the stovetop for popcorn and before it cooled began with thread to bind the pieces together into a single strand of yellow-white light. If there is a shade you can hear, that you are continually drawn to as you remember, it is this color yellow: the yellow that a test subject in an experiment on synesthesia once described as visually embodying both minor and augmented chords, their currents of foreboding and astonishment.

This catbird, inches outside, in full view to me, but hidden in the holly from another perspective, keeps darting from phrase to phrase until its stream of unconsciousness brings my mother to mind

sucking into themselves like I shied inward when asked, How is your father?

I was reading about exoplanets, places where there might be life, places with open seating, place settings made of iron and clay, where no one’s heart is closed

There is the Scratch. The Scratch, what is it? 

I am honored and humbled to introduce the following poems written in response to my poem “I’ve Been Known.” First published almost twenty years ago in a wonderful (but now defunct) magazine called Margie, my poem was picked up by Billy Collins for his project Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools,

Right now, our country faces a crisis of mass incarceration. With five percent of the world’s population, we have twenty-five percent of the world’s incarcerated people.  The majority of these are held not in the federal prison system but in local facilities—jails.