Our House Where our house should have been there was a hedge obscuring all but the roof from street view where our chimney pot should have been there was a cap to prevent the birds falling in and our souls from escaping where our front door should...

      Collared Doves She calls them beauty and handsome. I see two collared doves, but understand her chosen names. They sit together on the round feed table, pick sunflower seeds like canapes, leave the hemp; every bird leaves the hemp. Today, just...

      Coda The Old Testament There will be a dog, a great stowaway on the dazzle of a Celt’s smokers cough. All spasm and splint, a mollusc of sawn-off sticklebacks for a brambly tongue, licking bad days off the calendar. Dog, a corpse wax witness of...

      Don´t Let Me Sleep I already had visions laced with these encounters; bitumen coffee, sweet-cake pink. Your body spread before me, Oh god! Your long fingers. Let me offer you my still wet hand A slip of love, another creature dying. Tell me I...

      Wager I need coins. Not for my eyes but a wager, a circle of risky bets. Emptying my purse, I find a handful of silver, drum it on the table. And then I dig in, find actual shrapnel. Wounds become currency. Silent mouths gape punctuation. The...

      Antonyms for “Late-Stage Capitalism” I make noises with my mouth, some of which are words. I hold a receipt between my teeth while I take off my gloves and fumble with a keychain. Most of the stuff in my pockets belongs to something that no longer...

      Episodes a moth has swiped a thought right in front of my face a flicker and gone pure cheek the wing brush lingering my eyes scan the walls for pulsing fool’s silver smudges on the ceiling the ghost of a white shoulder bumblebees prey on me...

      Dormouse Summer When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. Byron, Journal 7 December 1813 Missing the small...

      A Death (After Tu Fu) The night is bottomless. I can’t sleep. Darkness smells of winter. Stars fade away, beyond my reach, like waves on a distant beach. In mockery the polestar dies last of all. My wine bottle is empty. I can only bow my head. My...