Avant-Garde
A man slouches before a uni-colored canvas
with the perplexity of a stumped technician
gaping at the unremittingly blank screen
of a television. He adjusts his stance,
a double antenna, in search for reception.
Poems
Instructions for Assembling the Miracle
Go light a candle in your darkest room.
If you can’t find the candle, find the room.
If you can’t find the room, then the candle.
If you go, you know, one of them will come.
At the End of the World Is Forgetting
In the abandoned stacks of the abandoned wing of the library where abandoned books are kept—there is quiet beyond the finger-to-the-lips shush, beyond the quiet thrum of the furnace deep in the womb of this place, beyond the low hum of traffic seeping from the streets.
Among Other Things
I bought her two pairs of wide-leggèd jeans at Target last week. For the longest time, like a year, I’d
Where Poems Go
In Tampa, Florida, Irene Ledbetter
sits at her desk to write to me.
She holds the magazine with my poem
about my brother and his dead dog.
Rural Education
When my classmate’s cow died
in the name of science they winched it
onto the junior high football field just as
the sky started to spit small white pellets