In the Family Room
Before they leave, his mother and sister and him, for what will turn out to be their last visit to the hospital, Jake, twelve and a half years old, sits in his father’s office in the basement.
Before they leave, his mother and sister and him, for what will turn out to be their last visit to the hospital, Jake, twelve and a half years old, sits in his father’s office in the basement.
Two children picked their way down the curve of a beach, in the clear air that follows a storm. The cyclone had strewn junk across their path…
in the two hour sunset after the eight hour evening I become a goop puddle in your passenger seat. you play that song and I don’t know which words are coming next.
Some human cells adapt to toxic stress by physically becoming other cells. Smoke enough, and tall columns become flat lung lines. Turn 16, and girl lining becomes home-in-waiting. The word for this is metaplasia. It is supposed to be temporary.
I am borne of a landscape of freckles. My mother, her father, his mother: the Williams and Shepherds, the English and Welsh. The bounty of peach farms, peace roses and quiet spirituality.
This poem was once a bird | An eagle in fact | Whose span of wing | And accurate sight | Was the stuff that legend makes.
I’m holding your drawing. It’s more of a map, really, a magic-marker rendering of your family’s redesign. Embellished stick figures rise…
Common as pennies, they mob the feeder, empty it in a day— nothing left for finches, wrens, chickadees— birds from the genus Passeridae, meaning flutterer.
These poems, (Siblings, Digging, and Reflection,) are a representation of some of the intense emotions I’ve experienced over the past few years, following the stillbirth of our first daughter, Braylie.