Throwing Doves
In a noisy city teahouse due west of the Appalachian Plateau, I sat sipping hot rooibos and spying on a lop-eared man sleeping on the sidewalk.
The Land of Motionless Childhood
Other people’s dust didn’t normally bother Kenny, but when Etienne unplugged the hipsters’ television set and gathered the cord to wind into a neat coil, the gray, rat-shaped clump that rode atop the snaking cord had an oiliness, something organic about it that made him flinch.
Killing
How the blade was not sharp enough.
How a duck’s neck is supple as a thick piece of rope.
Famous Tombs
Bees crowd the statuary, topiary.
White trees where the orchard used to be.
Low hills spotted with honey, the barn
Accuracy
The invention of consciousness
was as brutal as it was the birth of the past
tense. The past itself not a place, but the echo
On the Worst Day of the Fever
It occurred to me that I had swallowed
some shards of mirror without realizing it.
There was an ice fog that descended
and left me shaking. I began to realize that
I’d never actually held an entire conversation.
Night in Erg Chebbi
In July, seven months to the day after her brother’s death, they arrive in Merzouga, Morocco, gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi. The trip is meant to be a healing interlude, a brief escape; by immersing her in this place of exotic sights and sounds, he has hoped to give her a short respite from her grief.
Hour Thirteen
I had this thought upon learning that my fifth-grade math teacher was applying to be the first teacher in space: The space shuttle will explode.
I didn’t know what to do with this thought because it was so confident and so future tense and so informative. But was it really information? I was an imaginative girl and what the adults would say I already knew. Every time my family flew, I quelled a cousin demon: The plane will crash. Foolish, anxious me, never in a plane crash. So I dismissed the worry and by January 28, 1986, had even forgotten it until my reading teacher was called to the office just past noon.
Backward-Spreading Brightness
Clear enough to see you christen or condemn another
on the side of a beige building, I take the boat out
of the body that returns itself to me
Starlings
The most beautiful clothes: iridescent black over Snarl Call. I wore the soft Sparrow
to the store, I borrowed the Crow to bag food;
the Chickadee to the masquerade; the Vulture to the show,