Browse Topics
Wildlife
Separation
There is a dead snake on the cracked road. My son says it’s not a dead snake. He says the snake has just shed its skin and left it there.
May 2026Home Invasions
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.”
May 2026
The Coast of Nowhere II
Sleet and black rain / pelting the eaves, the kind of predawn / that reaches through the window, hissing, / Your heart never was a bird let alone / a bright-red singing one.
April 2026
Moon Jellies
Some nights I dive into the sound / and let the waters have me. / I’ve felt the brush of a jelly arm— / they never really sting. It’s the glimpse / of that phantom-thing gliding beside me.
April 2026The Patron Saint of Suburban Foxes
. . . Her own orange, though, deepens / in shadow to red, like condensed autumn, and makes her almost invisible / against the brick she edges past / on her burnt-matchstick legs
December 2025
Wild Animals
Swimming with whale sharks, hearing a mountain lion, refusing to eat a snake
November 2025
Considerable Luck
In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.
November 2025
Selected Poems
I know now, / having woken / and climbed away from you / in the chill / that I can do it. / Cast a spell / on my body.
November 2025
Avium
You don’t know what’s with Marjorie, // but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure / worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs / in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings, // you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet / it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly / to be believed. . .
September 2025Shimmer
We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.
July 2025
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