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Ahab went mad when he saw the sea is just the sea and nothing more.

Beached on the kingdom I learned to swim with my eyes closed.

Filarial worms in bloodstream darkness know when it’s night.

If you are hidden treasure, mine, don’t let me lose what I have gained.

A plastic Kroger’s bag caught in the chinking—Spelter’s only banner.

When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.

Oklahoma, a state shaped like a pot, probably some gruel inside.

As a girl I was raised to sing along with the rest. To praise. Especially men.

He could smell the bear’s breath, feel the hot huff against his ear.

All night, rain from the distant past. I sometimes waken as a child.

The wind was like a girl sobbing out her story of betrayal to the stars.

I couldn’t make sense of the ruined house, the love stained to its creases. Sometimes life is a sequence of departures, sometimes a destruction.

Sometimes the old men held their fishing poles like divinations.

My cry for the first time fastened garlands of hope to the roof.

Oh brother, the eye of the needle is shaking the weather awake.

They say the night watchman is so good he hears the grass growing.

Nothing is beyond texture. Wind mouths the shape of clouds.

Screaming, the children flew toward the trees in their saucers.

I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

Fires, always fires after midnight, the sun depending in the purple birches.

Wanderer moon smiling a faintly ironical smile at this summer morning—

My body. Stop the air. Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.

sunrise reminds the shama to emerge from her perch in the pandanus tree

She had seen him take the crop to a girl for doing nothing at all.

There was a fish. And then there was the consciousness of robots.

A man jostles my stride to the street, no shoulder on which to move.

We cling to an exact number of planets, to the Earth Our Mother.

They need to be named, loved, then unnamed to be seen once more.

Pulling the bird from his throat, how it’ll smell of bloodied oat.