She had loved sleeping in Todd’s arms at night, hearing the soft tinkle of crystal above her when cool drafts moved through the house, his hand wandering over the swell of her belly.

maybe a day in deep winter

love weaves a perforated web between the spikes of longing

Sunrise steals

Do not shake the baby. Shake the martini. That’s what martinis are for.

Your mother is a great and dying bird. Once, she tended her grand feathered nest. Once, she preened.

like the sky opened up and showed me a palace above the clouds. he told me he has traveled south beyond the black sea, to constantinople where the ocean is clear green

He spends his Sunday morning spraying WD-40 through the straw-like stream attachment at the expansive paper nest of beige and ivory striped wasps.

But by day the birds / of prey were in control.

She's not a poet, but does she have to be? She comes to the reading to read the poems of her recently dead husband, for she made a vow: that she would read his work at an open mic. Now she is keeping her word. It's her way of keeping him alive or maybe it's his way of…

The hairs on my arm lift with the breeze; a haunting breath from the open window carrying night-scented stock from the black-shrouded garden.

Newhouse returned his gaze to his wet palm, which he lifted to his nose with suspicion, sniffed again and again, then struggled to move out from under the growing stream.

Papa says an adding machine tape has gotten tangled up around his legs. He pulls it off his leg, but it's really his catheter tube, so he wets the bed. I tell him he's not in a tree, and I clean it up. He tells me all about it for an hour, and I to bed.…

No twinkle- so, planet, not star./ And bright, so either Venus/ or Jupiter. I’m guessing, Jupiter.

But if he's been photographing her for almost thirty years, there must be close to 11,000 images. During the session, they don't speak. And, after so long, words are not really necessary.