Ghost Buffalo

Sending wishes for a reasonably merry season: equal measures love and treason, schlock and meaning, harkenings and sudden freezings, grumbles, hymns, and tires spinning, gimme gimme and receiving twinklings and graceful leanings. (first published in LNR)

It's said that whatever the field, animals, religions, language, symbols, whatever -- similarities can be explained by just three mechanisms: convergence, borrowing, and common origin. I am busy trying to come up with a fourth.

As a child, it was quicksand. The very land could not be trusted. I took to poking the ground with a stick. In retrospect, this fear was sound. It wasn’t the quick that terrified, but the slow drown. (first published in SF Broadside)

Change is the new, improved word for god, lovely enough to light a song or implicate a sea of wrongs, mighty enough, like other gods, to shelter, bring together, and estrange us. Please, god, we seem to say, change us. (first published in Poetry)

You know the kind; each time she calls someone to her has been unkind. Victimized by her own kind, terrorized by daily crimes, she’s called to find some sweetness in a bitter time, and one small favor if you don’t mind. (first published in Measure)

Beneath her nest a shrew’s head, a finch’s beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the hour, and disregards the rest. (first published in Poetry)

Metaphor is an exception caught becoming a rule. - Nemerov

So much can be learned from the open curve of the question mark, from the comma's calm, from the certain G , and the soft w , from the kindred link of the q and the u , and yet, and yet, in this state, a breath away from the fervent curve, from the i and the u is the certain fear of a kind of dark: the abrupt chagrin, the erasure mark. (first published in Eleventh Muse)