BETWEEN US AND animals is a namelessness. We flail around generically — camelopardalis is what the Romans came up with or "giraffe" ( it looked to them like a camel crossed with a leopard ) or get the category wrong — a musk Ox isn't an ox at all...
It's confusing, after eating so much cauliflower From the serving tray, to find oneself alone Like this, a cutout on the cutting board long after The blade has dropped. Whatever is useful In the cruciferous digestive experience will lodge Somewhere in the psyche's cluttered nest So...
Mid-morning, a girl and dog attend the woods, the lilies of the valley just shy thin shoots. The Boy Scouts' flying squirrel huts are crooked after last night's storm, and the woody vines tangled loops,
depending. Girl palms the oak she calls half hers, two...
Three hundred twenty is the number of frogs I’ve raised and released during the pandemic. Yes, I’m trying to impress you, but I don’t count the dead. The ones the hunter drove over. The...
Last patches of snow all but gone and first wildflowers flecking the lawn, I walked out to the shed and pulled open the door with a woody squeak, and there, rising from the dirt floor, surrounded by a dusty clutter of tools,
Abby hates car rides. All buck and thrash, her gray swayback swells and her limbs flail like drumsticks when we lift her ("One, two, three!") into the backseat. Hey, if I'd spent ten years in a...
On the buffy-tan painted house sides there’s a hornets’ nest we let grow, huge domed head, anchored crown, helmet of paper folded and striated like metamorphic rock, ashy layers increased by each returning hornet, chewed wood pulp, saliva, soft tree branches masticated, first a papier-mâché bulb, phallic...
On the phone, when the vet who was waylaid sounded stunned by what Burke had just described, and reasoned that the mare was getting worse, Burke, although at first sorely grief-winded, found within himself another cup of poise, downed it quick, and then, as recommended, brought...
Stars among corn fields above fences the crows line like darkness points, spread over the earth like tea leaves in a cup; the sky without a cloud braid breaks the spell of people stepping from a church smaller than a sunbeam at sunrise or sunset.
II.
Not free, an inside color or outside color, I sit on the cottage steps and purr, a tomcat home to die for the...
So after M died, she turned to the dog. His copper eyes, the sinewy haunch muscles. The way he perched by the door of M's study as if sensing the body he missed behind it. Something she would not let herself feel, dry-eyed at the funeral, refusing...
Remember your neighbor who mistook a wolf for a dog? He rescued a pup from a storm not realizing it was a whelp. His trust in the pup was limited because of its strange eyes. The man paddocked off his garden and locked...
My mother warns me not to blow-dry my hair too hard, turning it from black to rust, and I must wear my black hair proudly. Black, the color of clothing my grandmother hates, because...
Is shut out on a balcony above the street. He is a prisoner among us, crying The awful boredom of observation, the unending Hours of afternoon empty to a creature Of smell and chase. His poor eyes see shadows Pass below; they are unsatisfactory. Voices come...
He came home from middle school with a wet kitten tucked inside his black leather jacket. He'd found it shivering in the tall grass flattened by rain. It could only belong to him for fifteen minutes and it understood that, I think. Though just a few weeks old, already...