Seeking Shelter
Though the library was closed, the lights had briefly blazed on, and she guessed Baker had broken in again. When Susan rushed through the front door and saw Baker, she grabbed the desk phone and shouted that she was dialing 911. Baker then fled through the side door. Then Susan called me, the librarian of this one-room rural Vermont library.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Grief, Memory, and Language: A Review of Victoria Chang’s OBIT
Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit, seems to have anticipated the prolonged good-byes of 2020. In it, Chang says good-bye to loved ones, feelings, objects—everything we feel and know, who we were and where we’re heading—especially when someone we love is dying, and our sense of awareness is heightened.
What Comes Alive Through Death: A Review of Jill Bialosky’s Collection ASYLUM
This stunning book-length poem, broken up into 103 sections, examines the grief and trauma associated with losing a young sister from suicide. Threaded also through these lyrics is a conversation with Paul Celan’s Selected Poems and Dante’s Inferno.
Three Poems
The shoemaker labors over his leather, his work./A singular lightbulb illuminates his hands, like a ner tamid,
Tumbling Upwards
This conference room could be in any country, any town: a pale wooden podium, bright overhead lighting, an army of white-clothed tables and a carpet with loud corporate swirls. The difference is with the babies.
3 Poems
I Have Been a Liar
I have lied, a cowardly man,
a lover of your kind; merely in mind;
movie-making, I have spent my seasons
coming, counting time by tissue:
quivering cock, finger-clenched, crazed.
Two Poems
In the painting the couple stands with their hands / touching and enough apart to notice the shaggy gray dog
Infamous
breaks the pattern of pre- fixes and suffixes not taking the stress: [in-fuh-muhs] which makes me think: muh-fuhs as in what you muh-fuhs lookin at? which could have been an infamous last question, given that those muh-fuhs stared at me all the...
The Island
Owen watched Aubrey press her palm into a thick patch of speckled moss girdling the trunk of an old Douglas fir. The move was gentle and precise, how a mime might seek an invisible wall, and he couldn’t help but imagine her locked up in some dark basement, kidnapped, as he suspected she’d been as a child.
Two Poems
Leave that Tiffany bling. It’s a pile of cold cash. / Facile, faceted carbon copies.
Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?
Once there was a person who was tasked with reducing a mountain into a flat plain. For a shopping mall. For a housing development. For a prairie. For the gemstones within. They moved their family to a new home at the base of the mountain, which was tall enough to keep...
Some Words About Proverbs
I’ve played my part as tourist in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, I skipped out of the way of ring-chiming bicycles. I drank Amstel beer under an awning while an afternoon rain dotted the surface water of the Singel canal.