Anthology

Participant work from co-writing events.

An Invocation

Only you hear
the splash. Call to mind the tiny crown,
water breaking 

open against porcelain.

Once. Twice and

once again.

Nighttime’s meager catastrophes.

Once. Twice. And again. Not enough to
move you, just enough to wake you,

ask you to listen. 

But you drown the sounds and their frantic echoes like moths,
stilled by the bright soapy water they mistake for the moon.

I don’t need the receipt

An artifact, vestige of an exchange
that requires you there and me
there. I hand you _____ and you give me

a long white sheet of paper, a contract
that proves I was here and you were here
where we held things out to each other to take.
And took them. As we agreed.

I gave you all I had, and you
handed me an itemized reckoning of
a moment I paid for.

Brood Parasite (or a prose poem written to define a prose poem to a classroom of high school students in absence of their teacher)

Ribbons and wattle and bits a better writer left behind: white pebbles, a full moon, “like clever Gretel” shaped with regurgitate–no, with daub–into a poem, solid and regular, like a nest, feathered, linty, fetid–cradling an egg, an egg of a poem, a poem that promises to hatch exactly as a poem should hatch, except a poem, like an egg, never–no, never–promises and, a poem, like forlorn Hansel (who you remember though I did not mention), tends toward self-destruction, so you feed the poem, the egg, the wasting Hansel (Gretel is long gone) breadcrumbs, and then, as expected, a cuckoo bird lays her eggs in your poem, and when they hatch, they call you mother.