Nocturne with Canals
Late at night from four hundred miles up (as seen in this NASA light pollution map), our native state becomes …
In This Kingdom
1. Overtures If things (as they are) are the skins our selves will shed, say them as we are. …
Eulogy, Scottsbluff
My stepbrother: who might not be in heaven. Whose body didn’t know which way to swim from that wreck, …
In the Year of the Metal Pig
It was a crapshoot, that year. Blown apart by its glorious squalors: open marriages you’d wanted as badly as your …
The Past
The train won’t stop here anymore. The station (or so you say) was stripped of its accessible copper wire by …
Apologia, America
Listen: it’s raining ash. The one holding his nose tight in blueish kleenex is your dead neighbor’s only certified son, …
Purgatorio, East Peoria
Again, the man in the window wakes from a dream of June bugs: fragile with heat, they’d thrown their bodies …
All Ye Faithful
The rented A-frame off Casco Bay has one-and-a-half baths and a mute handyman she hired in May. It’s December: his …
How Can I Help You?
Silver Ford Fusion, idling at the drive-up …
About the Weather
Word was she’d hitched west from the tip of Kentucky to get away from a man and twenty acres …
Visitation, Lake Cadillac
Your sister wouldn’t even shake its hand. Behind the felled sycamore, your mother shook sand from a plaid scarf. Tintype …
Eight
Kissed by the president in the airport lot outside Saginaw, her forehead drew crowds all evening. They came to her …
Seven Cases of Inertia
1. Sinking another hour in a frayed net the sun makes of the particulate sky. 2. Ditch lilies pivoting before …
Magda the Mule-Faced Girl
The Hubcap House: red tinsel grass, a wall of flyers reading “See the world’s first house made up of hubcaps, …
Transformer
A girl rocks back in the worn vinyl cushion of the city bus and passes a small airliner from …
Boy, 19, Requests Death by Drowning
In a concrete lot near Sturgeon Creek under a heavy rain, he closes his eyes and waits for the dashboard …
Dinwiddie County Fair
Everything starts ten minutes after dark. The ticket line already spans from where the gates are opening to this gravel …
Twelve Questions and Two Stipulations: Found Poem
How did this video make you feel? How strong was your emotion at the time? When the kinkajou …
Autumnal, Kansas
The sun peaks lower each day, arcing back behind the trailer park and into …
Thanksgiving, 1986
Cousins in this prison town bloated with step relatives and time, you and I grew cynical and fifteen. Grandmother, …
Todd Smith 