May I

  ginkgo After Han Kang’s We Do Not Part     When do you think they turned to stone? The moment they looked back?   Or do you think it took a little more time?                         Han Kang                         We Do Not Part for Katie L.   They’ve gone to chalk again, the rocks. The color I mean.   All summer they were dun dust & mud, unearthed as they were   from their slumber.   A broke open exhumation.   Cold dark, I think I see, I want to see a spark come up when it hits another – I   hurl them the way I was taught to hurl medicine balls, from the gut to the gut.   The way it is caught, the way   it takes, because of the weight, the breath that’s...

  West Quoddy Head Lubec, Maine Syllables Are Sometimes Compline, Sometimes Lauds   The longed-for is tiny, and tenuous as a syllable.                                                                                        Charles Wright             On Heaven Considered as What Will Cover Us and Stony Comfort   It’s the one beat, or one raised finger depending – how do you do it?   determine the number of vowel (two) sounds – see I need to watch my hand want to touch the formul...

Jochebed Holding Moses MFA Boston   Zoetrope  Relics, it seems, of the thing are always stronger than the thing itself.  Palimpsest and pentimento, for instance, saint’s bones Or saint’s blood Transcendent architecture of what was possible, say, once upon a time.                                       Charles Wright                                     Relics   Not recovery so much as uncovering all those post-it notes you drew on – whole packs - making your move.   A small dot you’d follow across the square slip of it, slip after slip, so that once done, once set in motion with the thumb, ...

Reign  This morning I was summoning up  the word son, its vowel of sound between  soft two consonants.  Lately, it has been  challenging me, a boxer-spar of my own  making.  Shadow-cast.   Never striking but always striking  depending on the softness or the severity  of the light.   From my room, the wind is lifting the fallen  leaves up into the sky again.  They are rain- glazed hands taken into the folds of ground  fog, a gown of sound.  Like the pause before  applause and then applause.  Soft and then  unsoftening, while the rain, momentarily  paused, momentarily holding off, begins to drop.  

  corner window pocket of air at the Olsen House Cushing, Maine Lull   I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours.  Which is to say, I am writing as a son.                                     Ocean Vuong                         On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous     Some of the snow is receding.  T- shirt receding.  I mean: it’s February   and yesterday it was 57.  I see last year’s green in patches.   I see snowmelt in the birdbath. The rim is slick with it to the brim.   I see the thin tango of a twine of morning glory vines in the surface of that   water: still, then ripple when the l...

  utter/un/utter   Names are limbs aren’t they third limbs they carry us like parents carry us they balance and ballast us they moor us and sometimes unmoor us their meaning to people who gave them to us they are climbing ivy they rise or maybe they are rooted from the grime their weight is gravity on the ground pressing into the living skin a way of passing a way of tossing the baton down the line from some other time its one way of making the living carry the dead their names at every spoken evocation listen the angel spoke to mary so we call what we name how we call how we name how we stand or handle how it is grafted into us our skin and it is scarless at birth it is and it sticks and thickens and it persists in the dark it is a chanting a spell of protection a prayer against a curse a prayer for it is when it is suddenly cut off without provocation or maybe with provocation the force it must take to make it a clean wound to make it say ...