Poetry

And then it wasn’t just plastic / at Gore Point in the Antarctic (population: 0) / but at thirty thousand feet above / the Pyrenees (population: birds) / and in the lungs of every living / lunged creature. . . .

When your phone dies, when the map’s legend goes missing, / peer into the gopher’s abandoned burrow. Or search for me / in margins between assigned reading and page edge. . . .

Imagine the nuns herding / the žįkážį into the cellar where it is cool, / dry good stores along the shelves.

Within these golden walls, this honey scent, / no anxious question makes my head go numb, / no frantic, topsy-turvy argument.

Night screech—Startle, the heart-race after a human / scream. Then silence and only suspicion of / a crime. Perhaps a rabbit has flown off with an owl.

For bee stings, my parents / would rub a spoonful of / doenjang on my skin until it / scabbed.

As in writing, as in memory, as in shelter, as in / delineations of form, say, the living // walls of a sod house, the corporeal, the body of, / (you) begin with. . . .

My therapist said Control what you can / so I began to speak with denser words. // With the slow determination of worms, / I digested morphemes. . . .