Encephalon
I remember her smile—quick and fleeting
on the day she arrived in the EEG Lab.
She was tentative, curious, quizzical.
What’s wrong with me? she asked.
Poetry Prize
My Father Transformed by Dying
I sat with him alone in the hospice room.
The breathing machine noises made a nap-drowse
muddle of me and I nearly lost sight of his star receding
from here to some galaxy far from where he was,
a place utterly unlike the stern man I knew,
who was so cool to the touch.
Purgatorio
It goes like this:
Two girls sit in a room and talk about God.
I’m one of the girls. You’re the other.
We don’t love each other and we don’t have a door.
Exodus: Gilliam Coal Camp, West Virginia, 1949
On the day before Junior Mary
graduated high school, she told
her mother Mary she wanted to
serve and protect, not in a maid’s
or nanny’s uniform, but in Army
greens. At seventeen, she wanted
to witness something other than coal
and dirt and mountains and trees—
The Internet of Things
The low tide riverbed silt
of things. The cloud-swept
distant hill of things.
White Privilege Skydives with Black Guy in Appalachia
While escaping Hillbilly Days in Eastern KentuckyI learn “tandem jump,” and, years later, “Shibboleth” We sit at the fold-out tables