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      Divining In the portacabin that morning, men smoked and looked at last week’s paper again. There was no water to fill the urn. The first job – to get connected to water and power. A slow hour went by of dirtied cards landing on the table. I was...

      Napsack A blustery day – the wind too strong for kites or for lifts to the sky. “To a thoughtful spot,” it cites and pins me to the earth. A dragonfly perches atop a little asphalt hill but zips off when the hill twitches and sniffs the air....

      I Cast Out Everything except this burnt red vase. Hand shaped in the muffled roar, devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth. Sand becomes skin of light. Its glass body trembles like a sea animal remembering its salt. I hold the lagoon’s sigh,...

      Under The Plum Tree Look, Drew, the plums are in pieces beneath us. I dreamt: you let the sweet ones rot at the bottom of your pocket, sagging like the canopy. Hannah is thirty feet long in a field of dandelions, waving...

      Night Out a flower is not a heron does not stand on one leg spear-billed over golden carp does not rise on wide wings neck curving into the blue flight like a slow heartbeat a heartbeat is not a flight does not lift a wary body translate a girl...

      Chant after Ammar Aziz At dawn and dusk, my father becomes a chant, that flies above the courtyard of the old house by the river, where only the men recite Sanskrit prayers by lamplight, as though in a divine trance, to Gayatri, consort of the...

    Wake The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen but that I will learn to expect and there’s a fracas-induced full moon, clouds beneath like soot from giant candles. I woke up and the time ahead was missing like Notre Dame’s gothic power and the spots gone...

      The Basement  The way a halved peach breathes, then rots from the inside out. Her tongue, a swollen garden of secrets. The corners of her eyes reach toward her burning shoulders.     Clara Howell is a poet born and raised in the Pacific...

      Prometheus Burns Down The Last Bar Of The Pub Crawl Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat trench-coated and ember-tense. Salt from...

    A Fistful of Cake Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs Ennio Morricone’s score wails as the camera narrows on cakeslingers’ squints. Eli Wallach’s, Clint Eastwood’s, and Lee Van Cleef’s hands tremble near leather holsters. Eastwood chews the...

      Eating Apple Pie with Louisa May Alcott When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie. Genie, exceeding expectations, delivers it hot. As steam rises from slits in its cinnamon dusted crust, I cut two slices....

      The tenderness of beans slack in a bag from the freezer aisle shaken out like shrunken grey memes I long for the podding of beans to run my thumbnail once more down the dark seam of your housing over broad lumps and bumps that split open to fuzzy...

      Three Winds I go to the top of the risen hill, above the trees, beyond the grass, where only hard ground lives —and three winds mingle, whispering, all merging in a jostle. They use my body frame to make sound and, listening, I hear, as they tell...

      Cracks in the Concrete We searched for it through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky in dark Pennine shadows where great mills spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog we learnt to see Yorkshire mist in charcoal technicolour Along the canal with...

      A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud -the PhD title of Brian May from Queen I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule toward his drifting pipe, Brian...

      Midnight Swingball Sleep. Elusive as lucid dreams. Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange, spiderweb scarlet & thatch-brown body      jerks                  like      a swingball. Conscience and subconscious flailing paddles back forward|forward back...