Augury
I’d been bleeding for a year when we unsexed the frog.
Cold and pungent from formaldehyde, it lay with limbs
splayed and pinned to the tray.
Poetry Prize
Basic Needs
Listen,
I could tell you about the hot cat shit
That lay in the hallway
Just outside of my mother’s bedroom
Palimpsest
We’re bicycling through the Tiergarten
on a summer morning in Berlin,
my wife and I, our son in his bike seat,
and it really is a lovely day …
Conduction
The man drives as closely to my car
as he can without making contact.
His truck window is down.
Baby Love
Gregory had a mole below his left eye
and sometimes kids in our 5th grade class
would tease him, saying he had chocolate
on his face.
Sonny’s Song
As a kid I carried fields on my back,
sharecropper’s black cotton, when daddy
wasn’t hoeing welts on it with a strap.