If you’re standing within swinging distance,
you’re standing too close, you’d say, shoulders squared.
But you were all bluster. In Nebraska parlance,
it really meant I want to embrace you as a brother.
You knew the same back roads I traveled and forgot,
those gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere,
to overgrown cul-de-sacs or abandoned feed lots,
the kind urbane folk rightfully fear.
To say we held debates would be a slander.
You would only offer: Speak plain. You’d say:
With your words, you could bring many over
to Christ. I was too arrogant in those days
to parse my pain from my avarice,
too cocksure to accept what was
the deepest embrace: the promise beyond

brotherhood—of stewardship and sacrifice.
Your death has only hardened what was wrong
when I left my church in that corner of Kansas
too afraid to claim myself, too young
and unwilling to forgive my family
for their imperfections. One by one,
they are crossing over; any lingering grief—
any doubt their corporeal bodies
resurrect to light in paradise—
could now only be construed as mocking
the dead, or a disregard for the righteous—
or worse yet, a violation of the faith
you put in me with your embrace.

Outside of Boise, four black horses bolt
quickly past my window, slow to a trot,
then pull away, their obsidian coats
shimmering like sunlight on the blacktop.
I am barely awake. The night before,
in the panhandle of Oklahoma,
I fixed a flat tire in a lightning storm,
watching the dense nerves of light branch over
the blue nimbus clouds in the northern sky.
There was no sound, other than the engine.
On such a night, Saul may have held his knife
closer to his chest—by morning, the sun
nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek,
his horse leading him into the city.

to visit the bed of an old lover.
What do I tell her—Do I fill her head
with secrets, or brush the truth like dander
from my hair? There is no balm in Gilead,
this is not manna, nor gossamer flakes
from desiccated saints whose frozen ash
melts on my tongue—it is the Cascade’s
autumn wind blowing through Snoqualmie Pass,
shaking the white crowns from the evergreen.
On the outskirts of Moses Lake, a crow
skims their broken tips—like an augur’s dream
scattered by daylight on the open road,
it wings irrespective of my vision,
angling lightly over Washington.

In spring, fireweed sprouts above Puget Sound,
rose-tipped cairns that lure a flock of seagulls
downward, winter-worn, to form a hill’s crown.
In the mouth of the bay, a tugboat’s hull
severs the slack water like black fabric,
the shape of the prop-wash an oil-green trail
that opens as a fan. The captain flicks
his cigarette butt against the ship’s wheel
and turns south to the beach, taking a fix
on the basalt cliffs at the shoreline’s rim,
the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks.
He charts a constellation on his arm,
the face of a hill which blooms in a rash—
the birds now spiraling upward like ash.

She’s been here before. The grass takes skin
as payment—thought swells past its given size,
a swollen court convened to discipline
the body it inhabits and denies.
The sun impresses dull authority
upon her cheek, a mark that does not ask,
as if the field had staged her silently
with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks.
She flares her nostrils. Breathing, she decides,
is thread pulled thin toward nothing she can see,
or cloudstuff waiting, stalled and undefined.
Meanwhile the sun, exact in appetite,
burns through the afternoon without appeal—
pure self, consuming what it cannot feel.

Your sins, random in youth, now interlace
as latticework in time you cannot leave.
You feel the warp and weft secure their place,
a frame that learns your shape by odd degrees.
Branch braided into limb, vine into nerve,
misjoined, yet fastening the life you own—
a blighted map you follow, swerve by swerve,
to hollows cupped beneath the oldest stone.
A scold of jays flutters just behind your ears,
their cries dispersed throughout the evening air;
the canopy comes loose. You stand and hear
your years let go, like leaves, like thinning hair.
The crown gives way. What sang departs the head.
You keep the frame. The body learns instead.

After the first collapse, the room grew wet.
Forms softened. Walls began to breathe you back.
Love taught you how to close around a threat,
how to channel terror, keep it smooth, intact.
We could not cut the sickness to the bone—
it nested where the mouth learns how to seal.
Each breath became a vow you made to him;
each vow, a shape the body had to feel.
You made the mask obscene enough to hold:
all lips and chambers, dotted into trance,
a face that learned how beauty molds its own.
Your husband held you there, his maddening dance.
What burned was not the mind, but what we spare—
the mask’s wet hinge—where breath corrupts to prayer.

In 2012 the ending failed to appear.
The clocks kept faith. The world refused delay:
history, relieved, went back to its career
of working slowly through us, day by day.
My daughter wakes. The room is thick with care—
the kind that counts, corrects, anticipates.
I feel my past arranged behind her stare,
a set of habits posing as her fate.
She has my look—the practiced doubt, the strain
of weighing kindness always for its cost.
I see my life already in her way,
a path laid narrow, difficult to cross.
She’s my stark mirror, shimmering in time
like silver wrapping paper catching light.