The sky whales sulk in, singing rain. Woodpeckers rally for something alive in the lifting clapboard of the sinking house. A human bruises a hammer arrhythmically
Debra Marquart
Rose gave me a blue string – the shade of the deep before creatures turn blind, as they sink into midnight, deprived the tint of icebergs
It was all bidden. To say otherwise meant ghosts were real, and spirits in forests no longer standing but being mined and shipped to burn. Deny
Inlet the way a river does: the mouth a black dog lapping a bowl of stars. The same kid always wins, shows up in the right
As in you, uploaded. Evaporated into the unmappable everywhere. As a kid, I saw sanctuaries of animals in the skies: contrails as pythons, schools of swimming
I won’t bury that part of me that is still boy between moth and butterfly who plundered blueberries from the tall grasses and sang of
Can you bring it? my son breathes into the phone from middle school. He’s forgotten his homework again. The last time, I lie, scraping ice off
After the fires came the rain. The creek skipped down to the sea. What’s drizzle? What’s downpour? asked the children of drought. They tossed their sticks
Fear tastes like nothing but fills my stomach with knots as I scroll through morning news. We’ve lived through the hottest October recorded in Central Texas.
On the summer solstice we bike to the edge of the forest, jump the tracks and drink wine on the bridge with no railing, because this