— For Archibald MacLeish again the voices of yesterdaygrant permission to our young MacLeish heard them all the way hometrekking through blinding snowto tell Ada things would be differenthe would not accept the partnership a man of letters and certain deedsanyway enough with poetic attorneys did she embrace her lover of words a lone gargoyle…

during the warmy papaw saw visions said the ground openedlike a mouth to eat him fire and brimstoneletters to Helen lost in the flux of bodiesin foxholes scribbled eighteenon the listing order to fight in the battle of troywith Achilles he won a purple heartpulled a man off the frontlines and the war went onand…

You’ve got to imagine Her skin is lavalike when you were a boyof six and you jumpedfrom bed to bed to avoid the searing floor You’ve got to pretend she’s a human – sometimes she has a tummy achesometimes she speaks underwatersometimes she gives moneyto the man outside the drug store in a wheelchairand sometimes…

I hide in a paper housein spaces where I need not speak.I take up pencil, notebook,write myself a rowdy place–hundred-story bunk beds; mermaids in the fish tank, dragons in the yard. Other books nourish mine–lend me their rhythms, their characters,teach me silent conversation, sprint with me through enchanted forests. I bloom purple, tape my binding,put…

the farmer wakes up earlyhe eats his breakfast late the morning spilling likebroken egg yolk over the hills in the barn, his dirt bike sitsunder a brown canvas tarp it hasn’t run in a coon’s agethe exhaust full of chicken feathers he’s traded in the open roadfor the neat pattern of a garden the smell…

The earth is the Lord’s,though we’ve borrowed it –like younger siblingscarelessly takingthis and that,returning brokenwonders,hopingHe won’t noticethe shrunken forestsand the once Yellow River,the exhausted air,the blood-stained livestock,and our unmistakable signatureover what was onceBangladesh. Featured Download: If you would like a resource to help you write poetry like “Lent,” CLICK HERE.

Last night’s dinner encruststhe gray enamel plates. The stickypaste of gnocchi hardened on the surface like gum that’s beenthere for months. The dishessing out in an orchestra of you’re an idiot and why didn’t you do this sooner? A ballad of you’re such a  procrastinator from the moundsof unwashed laundry, the pile of whining textbooks,…

I imagine his book of poetry to be blue—Cover blue, spine blue, pages, poems, blueMe, blue him to make blue That he exists bluely and glued To the notion of me praying for more poems To arrive from his side of life to my sad here. His signature is missing where signs speak Of the…