Poetry

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in memory of Alex Pacas (19) and Wyatt Whitebread (14), who died in a grain silo owned by Consolidated Grain and Barge in Mount Carroll, Illinois, on July 28, 2010 “The view was all in lines / Straight up and down of tall slim trees / Too much alike to mark or name a place …

Blank peal of a glass door in the archive of memory,you want nothing or you fear nothing, breath is the daughteryou never had. Escape offers its temporary attention, gazeset permanently on some middle distance at which a bridgecan be made out, dimly, to burn. I stepped ontothe archaeological site with a confidence borne of schematicsmy …

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback, published by Random House, 1982.

           with a phrase from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” a name is a noose that won’t let you be.my full name was once woven from threefibers, a cord of three that i dare to breakinto two knots on a tongue. please excuse,foreman, my Hebrew. Yirmeyahu means Godis high. it’s why i love the tower from distance.O- …

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was always our tax status. There’s no lovein money. Sometimes there’s no love in love.Sometimes love is a fish-gillslit in your heart through which you learnto breathe. That’s how it was.When I found the long silver hooksof another woman’s earringsin his bathroom drawer, I raisedan eyebrow. I said, “Oh.” Sometimesa waterspout rises from the lake …

grandma unfolds her dress, & 1967 patternsinto life, its story mapped in provinces, infamilies splayed naked on a dusking weave. The dressis handsewn, seaming bound by restitching. Lilac & rhubarbthreads haphazard & layer threefold along the waistlike fingers of smoke. Mesmerizing, because a dying fireis a spectacle. The dress of a hometown documentingevery small violence. …

It is winter butthe poets are still coming.I once lived in atown where there were no poetsor children. The treeswere made of salt. When the windshook, nothing happenedbut daylight. There were no handssince there was nothing to take.

a golden shovel / after Against Me! All I ever wanted to be—the summerdaydreamed of. Girl in the floral-print dress& endless golden fields. I just wanted youto future me, when so many people wantme past-tensed. I know I can’t convince themI deserve survival. A future togrow up into. I know that they can’t seea girl’s …