CACHEXIA OF TIME

His heart punched me. Now, not just the random heart strokes that everyone else is talking about or was talking about yesterday but the infinitesimal strokes that are what I most held onto after his last breath. I cannot begin to tell you the last breath—deep gutted...

MAPPING

— after Giant by Mark Bradford 2007 (torn pasted papers) @Museum of Modern Art Do not be misled by tiny broken bones that lookincapable of holding a teacupfrom your mother’s old set ofchina or a matchstick,the pretense of privacy,luminarias, buckets of...

SURRENDER

My youngest son is handling guns. He slides his delicate fingers, his palm, sometimes his still stubbleless cheek along the metal barrel. I know he does this daily in his new military life of hair shirts and the narrowed eye perhaps only I remember. You were like...

SHUTTERING MY BOY

The shutter catches the reedy boy and his size 44 pants dancing around his hips, the click of metallic and plastic and synchronization familiar in my ear, under my finger. But after he is gone, really gone, and I have processed all of the old rolls of film, every one,...

FROM THIS SEPTEMBER DAY

All war, under law, will from this September day on a dirt road in northern Maine where Albertine Cyr flies her French mourning hands into the night, often into the day, be conducted by women. The sucklers will choose where to place the charge, whose child to take,...