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Curve-Billed Thrasher

The curve-billed thrasher digs the small purple potatoes / from the raised garden beds and ruins them. / He sets them back into the hollows in which they grew, / each speared neatly once through the heart.

Chasing Hawks

After the radiation ruined her lungs, / and they’d drained fluid once a month, / then every other week, then every day, / my grandma said she wanted to go / home.

Ode To The Man Who Gave Me A Dinosaur Notepad On Our Hinge Date

Because he didn’t think girls don’t like dinosaurs. Because he didn’t assume / he was entitled to have sex with me because he bought me a taco. / Because our date was an hour. Because what he gave me was light / and easy to carry.

The Skull

When he held it out, I ran / my fingers over the shredded / cartilage of the nasal cavity / and the sutures that fused together / the cranium, the tip of my finger / gone for a second when I poked it / inside a shadowy orbit

The Patron Saint Of Traffic Lights

My child is in the backseat with her mother / and can’t understand what’s happening, / keeps forgetting we’ve already told her / that she fainted and hit her head hard / on our living room’s stone floor

Ode To My Brother’s Face Tattoos

At twenty you’ve managed to erase / our dad’s face from your own, / blacked out his sharp cheekbones / with roses, marked each eyelid / with an upside-down cross to distract / from his glossy brown irises.

Selected Poems

My son and I are sitting on his back porch, / early October, the gold locust leaves above his barn / giving the morning light something to shine in. / An unfelt breeze makes itself known / when the leaflets shake and shimmer.

— from “The Last Day, Again”

At The Market

It’s Sunday at noon, and the open-air / vendors are planted in their usual spots — picklers / pressed against the outer edge while growers / forest the pathways with kale, collard greens, / and patches of lavender.

Vanished

Where do those lost socks / go? The ones that vanish / between washer and dryer, / submerge in suds and never / surface again?