The Lie of the Land

“And because you are beautiful do not think/The Nereids will hear you, or Neptune wake/And the sea calm, and you will not sink”

Read more

Traffic

And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”

Read more

A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works

(Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns)

“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”

Read more

The Tide

“‘Where now security, what to trust?’/The cycle of an invisible moon has/Our harbor in its force, another period/Has begun: the existing limits to be tested.”

Read more

Love Makings

(Michelle Phillips)

Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”

Read more

Abortion and the Mythic Mother

(Wassana Somsakorn/Alamy)

They do not realize good mothering comes from fearlessness. Few things promote more fear than being deprived of control of one’s own body.”

Read more

Five Poems of Neighborhood 

“‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s snapper.’/“Did you catch it?’ ‘No, my dad caught it—/He says to watch out for any tiny bones.'” 

Read more

Fetterman v. Oz (And a Love Letter to a Conflicted Pennsylvania)

(Edan Cohen/Unsplash)

“Not everything stays the same, and, in many cases, it probably should not.”

Read more

George Psalmanazar and the Extreme Art of Imposture

“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”

Read more

Review: James I. Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea”

“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.'”

Read more

4 x 9

“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”

Read more

Dimorphism

And that we might as well stop killing one another,/because everyone who lived during the French Revolution is dead anyways.”

Read more

As the Leaves Begin to Change

“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”

Read more

Youth

“and Pastor speaks with God, while I/repent my youth that/like the flower which fades/has been my secret, golden calf.”

Read more

Fly Fishing

“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”

Read more