Category Archives: Poetry

for Dawn Thompson There is only one rule of any real value

Mrs. Butterworth stands on the windowsill of the Christianson Ranch shack, whose door stands agape with the hasp-screws rotted out.

Forty years down our wilderness path, neither I nor you recall the genesis. All we know is our tweenaged selves standing in shame before your holy father

A poem maketh not the sun to rise,     Obscureth not the wayward path at dusk—

today i shaved the right side of my face first as usual i puffed a bit of shaving cream astride my left forefinger looked in the mirror

for Joshua Dodds He speaks in a voice with eyes: eyes that hear, an ear that touches, a hand that reaches around your heart

Truth is necessarily loved in such a way that those who love something else—besides her—wish that other thing to be truth.

A man stands on oiled chipseal, camera in hand. The highway undulates distantly, nearly straight, as heat-shimmered dips lend the appearance of road-fracture, shifted along a series of faults.

In response to a Middle English facsimile of the Gospel of Luke The minims of textualis crowd themselves, ascenders aplenty but descenders few, into Wycliffe’s words of Gabriel to Mary:

The nameless cream-colored tom creeps quickly up and crouches motionless, knowing that the bowl of the birdbath keeps him concealed from the finch which perches on the far side, dipping its beak into the pool of clear water—dipping and preening.