Articles

Yeah, stuff breaks the page. So I don’t think that it’s that new. I think digital publishing, with all the things that come with that, has pushed it a bit and has sensitized us, and as we’ve become sensitized we’ve become— kind of delighted!

One of my most important writing practices is that I always try to pay attention. I look for images and ideas and language in everything. . . . For me, part of poetry’s purpose is to help make sense of the human condition, and I feel I can do that more effectively in my work if I’m participating in each aspect of my life as much as I can on a sensory level.

In January of 2011, my husband Eric shared with me an article he’d found about a hunter in Belarus who injured a fox and approached it with the butt end of the rifle to finish it off; the fox resisted, somehow got its paw on the trigger, and shot the hunter (not fatally, of course, which is why we know the story) before running off. It somehow got me writing poems about Fox, a shape-shifter who can be fully human or fully animal or a mix, always her choice.

A few weeks ago I visited the on-campus Western Gallery with editor-in-chief Brenda Miller, as well as several other MFA students and Bellingham Review editors, in order to view the Dianne Kornberg exhibit, Madonna Comix and Other Collaborations.

Once upon a rosebush, her body
snared in thorns.

How have I come to be trapped here? Whose curse have I aroused?

It was I, said the fallen willow,
stiff & dry as a bone.

Because I carved my name in your flesh?, she asked & it nodded.

At first, she’d been glad the cats had survived,
setting out what little milk she could find
to draw them close. Now, their glowing eyes
in the dark unnerve her more than the lights

that flicker on & off inside the charred,
abandoned houses or the ragged sounds
of buzzards squabbling in blackened backyards.

The plainer girls once told you
you were lucky—

your fair skin, the bowing of your lips—

Who resigned the rabbit to such blinking
silence when squirrels are given a stridency
that overwhelms the stuttering finch,

drowns the pulse of the worm’s twin hearts
undulating the length of its body. …

Are we fish or birds? If we are born
gilled, then surely a winged rebirth awaits us,

no longer earthbound, our animal
slits sealed over, sealing out
knowledge of what
came before. …

I. With Clouds

That year, whole seasons collapsed
around us. We were shirt-sleeved and suddenly
pummeled by storm. I prayed to be kept
fog-encased and unaccountable, out
of morning’s throat. …