Stories
Poem of the Week
I keep an eye on my shit—this body, this lost cause, this bad joke—
I want to be good at more than just childlessness and tying balloon animals.
Poem of the Week
When I cast my vote, I become just that tiny, abstract, lost, and essential.
Poem of the Week
Poetry isn’t work, he said, unless you’re talking about reading it.
Poem of the Week
Weird that yellow’s the color of cowardice when the sun never runs.
Poetry Contest Winners
Collage what we can, form fractured and repaired, blend of is and isn’t.
Poem of the Week
A plastic Kroger’s bag caught in the chinking—Spelter’s only banner.
Poem of the Week
Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree.
Poetry
All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.
Poem of the Week
I ought to haul out this junk I called winter and lose it somewhere.
Poem of the Week
As a girl I was raised to sing along with the rest. To praise. Especially men.
Poem of the Week
I was a darling without even trying, kerchief and dungarees.
Poem of the Week
I couldn’t make sense of the ruined house, the love stained to its creases.
Sometimes life is a sequence of departures, sometimes a destruction.
Poem of the Week
I see a young ZZ Top smiling, eyes darting from my shirt to my beard.
Poetry
My cry for the first time fastened garlands of hope to the roof.
Poetry
Oh brother,
the eye of the needle is shaking the weather
awake.
Poem of the Week
Death will come for us so fast we will never be able to outrun it.
Poem of the Week
You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.
Poem of the Week
They say the night watchman is so good he hears the grass growing.
Poetry
Nothing is beyond texture. Wind mouths the shape of clouds.
Poetry
Screaming, the children flew toward the trees in their saucers.
Poetry
People talk this way who would prefer the earth parceled out in standard lots.
Poetry
I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.
Poetry
Trysting lovers kissed while breezes fidgeted the leaves.
Poem of the Week
Fires, always fires after midnight, the sun depending in the purple birches.
Poem of the Week
Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile at this summer morning—
Poem of the Week
Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.
Poetry
My body. Stop the air. Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.
Poem of the Week
Years after the Sisters of the Holy Names left you unlock the door.
Poetry
There was a fish. And then there was the consciousness of robots.
