Help me turn my mind off. Help me be more than a song. The stress like a crow’s open flame. Help me to not give up on forgiveness. The work has become too wild here. Help me. Help me— (Days like today, poetry reminds me to live.) INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP …
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DARKENING, THEN BRIGHTENING The sky keeps lying to the farmhouse, lining up its heavy clouds above the blue table umbrella, then launching them over the river. And the day feels hopeless until it notices a few trees dropping delicately their white petals on the grass beside the birdhouse perched on its wooden post,…
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HE SAID I WROTE ABOUT DEATH and I didn’t mean to, this was not my intent. I meant to say how I loved the birds, how watching them lift off the branches, hearing their song helps me get through the gray morning. When I wrote about how they crash into the small dark…
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Hi everyone! I know it’s been a while again. But here I am: quiet little me, doing quiet not-so-little things. I’m in the process of starting a small feature series called The Curve with Write around the Bend, in preparation for their literary magazine launch next fall / winter, as well as an independent…
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AT NORTH FARM Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here,…
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—after Philip Larkin TO BRING THE HORSE HOME Is all I’ve wanted past wanting since I was six and delirious with fever, an infinitive forged from a night when giant ladybugs with toothpick antennae patrolled my wicker nightstand. Yes, I’ve been with horses since, travelled illegally with them in trailers, known certain…
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not an elegy for Mike Brown I am sick of writing this poem but bring the boy. his new name his same old body. ordinary, black dead thing. bring him & we will mourn until we forget what we are mourning & isn’t that what being black is about? not the joy of…
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—in the wake of another tragedy: praying for France THOUGHTS OF A SOLITARY FARMHOUSE And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally— it is only the force we exert all our lives to exclude death from our thoughts that confronts us, when it does arrive, as the…
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PURSUIT —for Arctic Explorer Donald B. MacMillan Provincetown, September All summer, town kids pose at the edge of the pier named after you and leap. I’ve just flown home from Baffin, Mac. A month of spotting polar bears, lecturing on tundra as raw wind shrugged us off, then winter chased us down the…
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THE WOVEN MESSAGE come hide near me I’ll count however long I need to count the insects in the web— I like the still living ones—that beat of wing I hear or the still turned-on ignition of the firefly—I see one’s underbelly blink on and off—come hide near me, somewhere in this wild…
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