God is a catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana and we would eat Him on Summer Sundays after Mass.

The distorted face has always been her forte. The distorted face is the contrabassoon. I’m grimacing.

Kingsessing in Southwest Philadelphia is a low country of porches and brick. A long green edge where Cobbs Creek keeps the seasons and the city sets its weight down

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers.

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers.

It was the weft and wop of the weave, pulled / over my knee, muscles and tendons that / repaired my split thigh, a pattern, the surgeon said, / a kind of living fabric that carries me forward,

The copperhead slithers along without bending / Its spine. The ridges on its underside are like / boot treads. / That was the example I was using / Until he thought I was calling him a snake.

There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings, after your husband has gone to work, when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back.