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Every dawn you’d toss the feed, your hands faithful to the good work of rising.

She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.

Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.

Each night I curl my body around a small piece of silence.

It swims for a while, but abandons itself, slips from its own grasp.

We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

Sing so dogs bark, oxen bolt. Sing so a girl walks out on her lover.

What’s a man supposed to do when his best friend is a falcon?

Flies at our dinner—Won’t eat much sings the tiny ghost of my mother.

Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.

We’d hit something in the dark which—bang!—was there and gone.

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.

Owen’s head throbbed, his ears ached, and an anvil sat on his chest.

I crouched just like my mother burying nail clippings to ward off curses.

This is the woman who had shrunk so small, nobody could find her.

Grasshoppers tumble from the reeds, snapping like electricity.

Bees kill wasps by gathering around and tightening in the middle.

She’d seen snakes before, but she’d never really looked at one, until now.

Where my mom was wasn’t never far from the Myrtle Beach Days Inn.

The moon it is red, and the stars are fled but all the sky is a-burning.

I could go in for some pie why the hell not, there’s so little time.

You’re standing too close to a lit house which could be yours—is it yours?

“Who is it?” Irina asked at the door. “Open up,” a voice commanded.

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

The first skeleton drawn from the earth, they called beautiful.

Beyond her ampleness, he stands a small man vanquished.

All the bears in the zoo look pathetic. Their eyes glazed, bodies lethargic.

Arriving on earth’s paradise, wearing only light for their bodies.