Jing3011

I have walked through fat countries,
leaves,
water, and
blue days
looking for places where I can keep your safe.

Now the orienteering map is yours,
but tea stains
and remnants of drie…

The restless swimmer
with the aquafir of his
mother’s taut belly
dreams
of baleen-sifted plankton,
spiny crustaceans,
and gray green kelp waving
languidly beneath the sea.

In a tim…

Come with me to the edge of the world
where dust that once lay on a pterodactyl’s wings
intersperses with ash from a hole-inb-the-wall
Vietnamese restaurant that burned in 1942.
You will se…

Today I am wild within.
It may be the influence of
the jawbones I toted back from
Turkey Creek
or
the quiet power of the flute hymns
of R. Carlos Nakai.

Today I stir incantations …

All summer long
I have been planting
newspapers among my flowers,
mulching them thickly
with freshly gathered grass.

The photos of the
drunk who killed his girlfriend
and the soccer…

November vegetation
in myriad shades of brown
withers dry.

Death rattles
tatter
across papery fields
of
corn.

Milo,
old and rusted
hunches troll-like
abandoned near
Beal Slough…

“Cider,” he said, “Isn’t that just apple juice?”

“Oh, no,” I say, “Cider is wild turkeys brazenly crossing the road on the way to Percival, Iowa.
It is white sheets hanging on the line, wil…

The bones are always the last to go.

It is the femur caught in tangled grass,
It is the jawbone curving like a cupped hand
around the remnants of what might have been.

It is the shell,…

In the calming before sleep,
when hipbone and mattress lie
in quiet opposition,
neither wanting to give in,
I build for you a house.

Sometimes the design is yours,
sometimes mine.

Th…

"The house stood over there,"
he says,
"We had no electricity.
Our wash was done by hand.

We butchered a hog that year,
just the two of us.
It was laid to rest
in the cellar
piece by…

A Nebraska Sand Story

It is my understanding that sand stories are indigenous to some people living in Australia and are mainly told by women and girls. The storyteller draws designs relat…

A faded barn
set back
from the road
unnoticed
except for
a photographer lugging a tripod,
a poet lugging words,
several nests of mice,
pigeons looking down from the rafters,
a cranky …

Dark birds
November stirred
swirling like
black turtle beans
through windy broth.

My great grandmothers,
now locked in picture frames,
murmur softly in German
and Danish,
neither of which
can I understand.

On the other side
of the glass,
I whisper words
of joy …

The auctioneer coughs twice,
clears his throat,
and begins to sell a life.

What was carefully put together,
begins to come undone.

Few notice the old farmer
pressed against the wall.…

For a Moment

Sometimes it comes together,
and you taste the wholeness of it all…
the marigolds blooming
in concert with the mums,
the prayers you whisper
for those you love,
the O…