Poetry

Picture if you will Tony Hoagland
and me, he in his Donkey Gospel
hat and me wearing my Hustle ring,
in his car patched with silver duct
tape and sagging passenger mirrors
discussing vehicles as metaphors

You don’t dress your mouth
in my blouse. My body crinkled

There is, in a nearby field, a retired show horse living out
whatever days it can win, a white horse speckled with brown
flecks. Its limp mane welcomes your hand. On its face,

I’m tired of being a woman. I walk
into grocery stores and laundromats wet
with the cracked face of a maidenhead
lurching across the Atlantic.

We were quick to tell each other what we wanted. I said, I want to be cremated and then I want my ashes to be tossed in the Pacific and the Atlantic. He said I was greedy for wanting both coasts, but he’d do it.

After the pigs and lambs and rabbits were sold off at auction they
bought a 30 dollar goat and named it Snowflake Brownie and then
a second one called Cookie Dough the third Brandon but the names
melded into dubbing them the Healing Goats...

There are seven of us in front of the mayor’s house asking questions about the boy they shot twenty-two times 

There are seven of us in front of the mayor’s house screaming about how the videotape of the shooting was covered up so that the...

It was actually a good year, the year before the downfall, a surprisingly good year in our little town. It was a year of bread on the table, a year with a new IPA in our glasses, a year with friends who visited with great frequency.

To...

A good place to hide a drop of water is a stream.
A good place to hide a stream is beneath an ocean. 

A good place to hide a man is among thousands
of other men. Watch how they rush
through the city like water through a ravine. 

I fell on an incline, talus, tibia, fibula, calcaneal tendon mangled, 
red circuits ruptured, body facing east toward a little town named 
Climax and then New York where I once danced in a circle of girls