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Poetry
Pink Suede Boots
Decades old now, / but the leather’s held up, and the curve / of the instep is still elegant. / I gave them away to my goddaughter, sixteen / and blossoming.
March 2024When I Come to Get My Things
I am amazed at how much of my shit I left / with her, and to see it piled in her hallway / clears space in me for what? // I wander my new emptiness / as the small bag of her things I’ve brought / weighs down my hand
March 2024King Rail Reserve
Wind-plowed furrows in ice across the marsh. / Cattails frozen suppliant. Loosestrife withered // colorless under a bright but ineffective sun.
March 2024
Noah’s Wife
Noah, his swelled head, his ego larger than the ark, his crazy / self-promoting savior mania. Because of him we dropped / everything, sank our fortune in cypress wood, and every / filthy creature we couldn’t trap we had to buy with our last coin.
February 2024Mountain Flowers
When I was sixteen, / pickup truck, load of hay, / there was nothing I’d rather see / from the window than women’s underwear / hanging on a backyard clothesline.
February 2024What If Pain No Longer Ordered the Narrative
She’ll replace me with another beloved one day, as children do, and if I don’t let her, I’ll have failed, a different failure than those nights she brings me books to read when I’m too tired.
January 2024Spring Garden Street
I had left her sitting on the front stoop / and crossed the street / to light my cigarette—April / in the early evening, / the pear trees with their arms full / of white blossoms, comfortless as ghosts.
January 2024I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback through the Streets of Houston
Who isn’t, at twenty-three, sexy? In never-been-kissed / cutoffs with buzzed hair. Did I even have a beard yet? / I looked like the virgin I was—was, at least, in all / the interesting ways. “Chicken,” they would’ve said / back then.
January 2024Last Bath
It hasn’t happened yet: the awkward bloom / of my children’s bodies, the bathroom pin-lock / pushed in, the steady stream of marathon showers, / bolts of thick steam all shadowy blue.
December 2023Lumps of Coal
He was ten and drove a team of mules / through the shadows in mine shafts, / pulling a wagonload of coal / that glinted in the carbide light / anchored to his cotton cap.
December 2023
