I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here

Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”

      Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...

With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.

You ask me why

I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.

You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls

      Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...

The Renault rocks left to right, waddles up an unmade road, squeezes through the trees.

I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia 

not yet ready to blow open its thousand furring buds—
every year the same urgency—