Wildflowering
Pock-marked—yet her face is perfection, (or close enough for the reach of praise) each enlarged pore, pit a star in the banner weaving across sleek cheeks below the hunter eyes that pay no serious attention to past struggles with oil, hormones, and stress, but stake the opposing orbs that must notice the pinprick fields, blooms, before caught above, beyond the necessary...
Read MoreRiparian Life
The grass crackled and frozen looking like sand and salt in the Egyptian desert, the source of natron that preserved the eviscerated and brain-hollowed bodies of dead pharaohs, still draws down a gaggle of Canada geese who must remember the site and near river of life much shorter than the Nile but sustaining enough even in the tired and soiled days of February for those beaks that peck and webs that stride upon last year’s vegetation that will renew without a weighing of heart against feather by Anubis, the jackal-head, so the big birds don’t have to worry their mortal...
Read MoreIf Rather Perpendicular
If we imagined the divine as horizontal instead of vertical, would saints have wheels—or skis, in northern reaches? Would worshippers look into the distance with leveled eyes and imagine their loved ones beyond the line of trees, hills, or concrete? And would houses of worship be tunnels whose ends projected their sacred symbol, to the vanishing point where vision failed and faith necessarily took over entirely, in that realm of metaphor perpendicular to ours and our privileging of up and those wings awfully useful to reach...
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