Rhododendron

  I am unsure as to where this flower ends or where it began. The small connecting limbs, hidden behind the round series of heads, the seeding centers, their odd tears around the edges like teeth. There is something oddly promising about these flowers—you...

Highway / Windmill

                                 Asphalt and salt, the tires burning in the heat. The crops are dying. Brittle limbs, the yellow tinge, still reaching upwards. And then the...

The River Turns White

  with skyline and sun. The dark shapes on the water are like turtle shells, inverted and empty, then sinking as the sun moves higher. Fish rising and falling with sea and storm.    

Reading Jennifer K. Sweeney

  ADOLESCENCE   1 In the scoliosis clinic, I waited in a room of skeletons while men reshaped the architecture of my sister, spongy discs stacked in S-curves like haunted seahorses, undulant when I shifted a protuberance side to side in my thumb and...

Pomegranate

  This is how it happens—he lifts the dress above your head and brings it down around your hands. You become a peacock, all feathers, all lace. You breathe deep, shrinking your frame as he fastens the eye-hook, zips up the dress. Then, the...