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Natureexpand_moreHe handed us sticks of dynamite, rolled in wax paper like taffy.
I woke in surprise to your breath warm as your skin on my neck.
He whispers words that sound as miraculous as the skinned fish of the clouds my father writhed like pentecostal snakes while he drove drunk
Ron Carlson
This storm scares me. A foreign climate occupies the land.
No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.
I managed to talk sensible Alice into a little pink outfit and high heels.
At night everything feels. Even a river feels its way through the woods.
She is eight years old and doesn’t recognize the word divorce.
Sometimes a story is like a beehive. Sometimes an idea is like a poem.
Are these poems just cumbersome or a critique of cumbersomeness?
The noiseless trees, the insentient breezes that are not there.
Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.
She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.
Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.
Each night I curl my body around a small piece of silence.
The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.
The people with pebbles go home to frolic under the detritus of the day.
It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.
Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.
Sing so dogs bark, oxen bolt. Sing so a girl walks out on her lover.
The tomatoes weren’t there. She looked again at the ground.
What’s a man supposed to do when his best friend is a falcon?
The local madman’s been here even longer, lying across the sidewalk. It’s no sin, all who hurry past his babble: no word-salad unlocks God.
Between me and the sky is a screen door and a whole mess of wind.
Flies at our dinner—Won’t eat much sings the tiny ghost of my mother.
No parent has yet been born who can save a child from childhood.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.
Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.
No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead?
