This Story Is a Gun
Back then, you would have mistaken me for a happy person. Bright, cheerful. The kind of young woman you wanted your lost-in-his-dreams-of-moneyed-youth son to marry.
You would have thought that I was healthy. That I was pretty. That I was kind.
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Recent Posts
Double Mastectomy
They poked me with a straw / sucked out some adipocytes, five bulbous bubbles.
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Trout Fishing with Heroin Addicts
I was a novice angler. / A junkie, nodding out, / Whispered, come a little / Closer—I’m going to / Let you in on a secret.
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A Deceptively Simple Word Problem
I have always enjoyed a deceptively simple word problem. When used in this context, the adverb could mean both that the word problem is deceptive in pretending simplicity, but also that it is simple despite its deceptively intimidating appearance. The former iteration is the case, here.
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Everyone I Know Is Here
On the packed Purple Line Express train, Emma pretends that every person touching her is someone that she knows and loves.
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State
They have no names on their jerseys, only numbers. Names boost the ego, the former coach had said. Names separate the team. We all win. We all lose.
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A Review of James Davis May’s Unquiet Things
Unquiet Things is the debut collection by James Davis May, a poet with prodigious powers of observation and description. May makes metaphors and similes from everyday things in ways that elevate both the object and its comparison into something arresting and original.
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Blessing
People see my scar and say
You’re lucky.
Four Fragments
fragment 4:14-15 ...still the air, what rusty trill unsettles from the tree? I am listening for the direction of your next call. My whole body devout... ...the river’s water is a glass of sky rounding the bend. ...
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Two Poems
On Quality
I call it the Yeats effect, and sometimes the Chekhov effect or the Elizabeth Bishop or Philip Larkin or Alice Munro effect. To me it represents a standard of literary quality that is widely, even universally, agreed upon.
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A Review of WINTERKILL by Todd Davis
In 2012, I moved to Vermont. Before making a home in Vermont, I had spent a decade either living full time or summering in the mountains of Colorado. During my time in the Saguache Mountains, I learned the deciduous trees—the quavering aspen and cottonwoods that snow down their seeds. I learned the smell of vanilla comes from ponderosa pine. At one time I could name nearly a hundred Colorado wildflowers. Columbines, lupine, elephant’s head, monk’s hood, death camas, and my favorite, the Gunnison sego lily.
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