Defuncted

I can only wonder at this blurred whir of evidence, clouded in the blue fan of a thousand wings. …

Astrakhan. Sunday evening. Fine, but with occasional showers. Dear Loomis, your drawing is so lovely that I pray to it daily. Mrs Sanjay…

Curt knelt in the gravel before the dying fire, eyelids heavy, head nodding, his heart resisting the sleep that was embracing him. David…

Two Tuesdays ago, Eloise Cowles succumbed to a gas leak undetected in the shoddy studio she alone rented, not the tony townhouse her…

The young boy stoops in the dirt. The house where he sleeps looms behind him. Its sides, once white with neat green trim at the windows…

The quiet forests of this place masked a raging battle for souls and hearts. When I leave here, don’t uproot me.

stars like light humor set time machine correct date wrong planet crew sights land ahead after ten days in small raft

In the old days, when people ran so fast through the woods with bows or behind plows just to catch up to their hunger …

In seventh grade I was sent to the principal’s office six times for laughing, my giggles chronic hiccups

No hiding permitted after Day of the Dead. November light spares nothing. Shadow and sun adhere to designated borders. The air cracks.

I’ve used the word “scared” so often, so thoughtlessly, in my lifetime. This time was different.

Some corners are auspicious, some confused. In Iowa I once lived at Sunnyside and Bittersweet.

see how she spins: slightly off-kilter, axis asymmetrical, her colors blurred as she dances to the music of the stars.

In the final weeks she lay propped on a stack of pillows, her hospital bed in the dining room now. They’d stopped the chemo …

Johnson enters Burrard View Park by the southwest corner, near the daycare center. Between the daycare and the tennis courts there’s a…

At the edge — literally with toes on the door’s sill, heels still in the yard’s dirt. It’s as close to perfect absence as I can get.

I don’t speak Gaelic, and I’ve never been to Venice, either, she said—between bites of her sandwich—

You keep returning and I can’t say why. I wake in the shrouded room and lie still for hours.

The cup is half empty, I say. The cup is half full, you say.

Making a suicide pact with billions of people would not be a safe bet. How would I know if some didn’t keep to the agreement

home is a prison made of gingerbread: home is free- falling through ice and fire to land among tangled bedclothes: home is hearth-ash

Quick Change: Imagine pain that shoots from my head clear to my ankles. Along the boulevard, imagination gravitates …

Our history in salt water I can’t meet their reptile eyes liquid obsidian mirrors these seem the most vulnerable despite jaws …

Something hits the air outside of Cheyenne — a burning scar across molecules of sky. Something heats itself through friction …