”Pine’s Prayer Against Lumberjacks,” Orion, from Faun.
“The Changeling,” and “The Two Thumbelinas,” New Orleans Review, 2022–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“We Have Gone into the Light Where No Farmgrrl has Ever Been,” Yalobusha Review, 2022–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“My Parents Tell Me to Forget It,” Under a Warm Green Linden, 2021–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“On the Shores of Lake Superior, We’re Saved By a Mysterious Bird,” Entropy, 2021–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“After Our Parents Get Divorced, Our Mother Buys and Ivy Stencil,” Plume Poetry, 2021–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“Born Again in the Light of the Self, which Is Death” and “Another Dream of Death: Montana Vermiculite Contamination,” Permafrost, 2021–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“After Working on a Dairy Farm for Six Months, I Realize That I’m a Demon & So Is Everyone I Know” at Triquarterly–From “The Nameless” (forthcoming Kernpunkt Press, 2023)
“Lake Superior,” “Breath,” and “Mimicry,” Columbia Journal–From FAUN.
With Michael Barach–“Love Letter 16. Ring of Fifths” and “Love Letter 18. Words Are Wind in Shut Spaces,” Another Chicago Magazine
“Lily and Gog” (except for the final section), Zone 3–From GOG
From Faun:
LOST IN THE FOREST, I GIVE BIRTH TO A FAUN
(Published in Ocean State Review)
In a leafy swoon, among the stag-shaped
lichen, I rest my head
against pine bark, beyond marshes, beyond
creeks, where ghosts of graylings jump, where the dead
uncross at dawn among the vines, and a faun—
human above, animal below—is led
by gravity into blue. While walking alone
in the forest, my water breaks, bursts,
beckons, Faun
feels the primordial water-universe
seize, contract, drain. Where there was darkness
there was weightlessness, but now the surge
of matter, flesh forcing, the earth’s nest
pulses green, pulses high C
sharp, pulses I-am breath.
*
The cattle’s bones turn into wrens. Then
I’m a shadow’s shadow. Animal is human and human
animal: animal-born, animal-raised, animal-taught.
Wrens embody animal thought with human rage.
Wrens speak in the language of power against
the language of power. Now the wrens
laugh at the destruction of the world and dress me
in prisms. Now death is a sea of animal-light
above the flying bones of cattle.
*
What creature stalks what creature claws
blood over blood her cold body creat
ure of Death in the branches I hear h
er cold body blood over blood the branches
stolen stealing a soul stalks the crows c
law Death in the branches stalks what
in the what bran chwhat stalk swhat
blood her cold body lacks oh hospit
oh hospital emerge over the branches
bloodove rblood sirens emergency
This is an emergency
This is an emergency
This is an emergenc
*
Manbuck deerfootedhumanface
horsehuman hornsapien
trick this trick trick dreaming I
‘m dreamaging wakeup wakthfkup
dudefaun
old panor some satiremyth
ologybro buckman songoat wake
clovenhoof ohno clovenhoof ohjeez
us horns and a clovenhoof oh devil
DEVIL
DEVIL
DEVIL
DEVIL D
EVIL EVIL
EVIL
*
It’s time for my body to surrender born
red animal knot human not alien
I know I’m like a wren in stillness worm
hammered leaf breathing a salmon sea breathing saline
my hands are
open my eyes are
riddles stranger
hands reaching up & up my harvest swells alone
the first woman’s bloody hands reach five eight ten
fingers dripping
why am I ashamed?
without
blood I’m barren without blood I’m a machine
but not today today I leave the earth & enter
a red world of beasts with clouds floating under
** From Gog**
MY BEST FRIEND AND ME
At ten, too old
for dolls, we hide them.
The toy bin snaps
like a sacred book’s
binding. While our parents
sleep, we write ourselves
gods, and the simple plot
we began spins from us until
the characters start
to question the rules of
their universe; they do
terrible things; they horrify
and excite us until morning.
And I wish I
could end here, but the dolls
are already changing faces,
appearing in drawers. My mother’s
car doors are opening
by themselves, and the house
is cold, cold
as the halls between biology
and gym. We fail
our classes. Someone yells
lesbians; the word spits
like the fire pit where
my stepfather burns
dolls, poems, stories thick
with dialogue. He calls
the exorcist, whose business card
was given to him by Pentecostal
ministers. These same men
guide me through
a twelve-step recovery program
for the possessed. I renounce
yoga. My parents
divorce, and we move
to another town. My little cousin
dies, but I dream it first.
First appeared in Prairie Schooner.
CRONE-BALLAD
When my great-grandma’s husband drove by with another woman,
she punched him in the face.
When her daughter married a rapist,
she punched him in the face.
When her son slept with her other son’s wife, then slid
his motorcycle under a semi truck,
she wore a red dress to his wake.
There were blue birds, red birds, grey birds whose tails salt
wouldn’t bind. There were great-great-grandmas, aunts, uncles,
peering through glass.
When her husband kicked her pregnant belly,
she earthed the stillborn in a shoebox.
When the bruises spread like violets,
she earthed the stillborn in a shoebox.
After she named her Sharon Rose and dug an unmarked grave,
she washed the livings’ socks.
A loosed canary flies into the glass.
When her husband left his first family in Hungry, the woman
cursed his children to die young.
The woman he left in Hungry
cursed his children to die young.
In a tiny town in Michigan,
her boys dropped one by one.
Birds line up on the sill to peck the glass.
*
Great-grandma said:
Forty years of pot roasts, hams—
my lingerie hangs
in the closet, still tagged.
Each time we saw their stitched faces,
we passed the opiates,
flicked cigarettes into a vase.
In her dream, she told me:
It was red.
It was the red scarf.
It was the red scarf around the neck of
the pregnant girl
he left in Hungary.
*
Great-grandma spits into her garden,
complains about a treaty her Blackfoot mother signed.
She hates crops. She hates farmers.
I stomp a colony of ants.
We practice
shooting cans. I shave my legs
with her purple razor. The wildflowers
bloom all at once.
Even in winter, I pump my legs
on the swing set, cold turning my chest
to a porcelain egg
where my great-grandma’s stillborn
scratches and turns.
There is one way to escape the dream: break your neck against the glass.
*
The last words of Mary Warren Toth Seibert Prochaska:
Lousy cocksuckers.
She approaches death
like a wounded bear. Her red-tinted
hair heralds her combustion; her
heart is packed with gun powder, and she’ll drag
us down with her. Goddamn.
Every breath is a supernova, a blue
membrane sparking around her shadow’s
husk. She’s a triple-shift, three-husbands-
before-1960, tarot-reading, play-any-instrument-by-ear,
ham-fisted, ammonia-in-the-bathwater,
pick-your-teeth-up-off-the-floor bitch.
First appeared in Ninth Letter.
More poems available online:
“Cult of the Dryad” in LaFovea
“Love Poem to the Light Before Sleep” in Mayday Magazine
“My Best Friend and Me” Black Lawrence Press
“Homunculus” Black Lawrence Press
“First Arrow” and “Buck” Newfound Journal