#AmericanWriters
Someone said my name in the garden… while I grew smaller in the spreading shadow of the peo… grew larger by my absence to anoth… grew older among the ants, ancient
To pull the metal splinter from my… my father recited a story in a low… I watched his lovely face and not… Before the story ended, he’d remov… the iron sliver I thought I’d die…
Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,
Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.
In the dark, a child might ask, W… just to hear his sister promise, An unfinished wing of hea… just to hear his brother say, A house inside a house,
Here, as in childhood, Brother, n… And someone has died, and someone… born, while our father walks throu… and sets all the clocks for spring… weighs heavy on my forehead, his d…
When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voi… Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to th…
There’s nothing I can’t find unde… Voices in the trees, the missing p… of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging
That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a… its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It’s up to no good,
People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.
Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?
I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son… My little root who won’t drink mil… Little pale foot sunk in unheard-o… Little clock spring newly wet
Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipat…