Silver Lace

The soil cool against my cupped palms, I cradled the root structure of the silver lace plant removed from its pot. Tiny white strings snaked around my fingers like scars in the dirt.

Seeds had gone into the same plot of soil together but were sprouted now: the plants needed more space, needed to be removed, needed distance from the encroaching roots of their brothers.

We sat around a picnic table outside the greenhouse and extracted the seedlings with silver spoons. Delicately, I dug my fingers through the dirt to untangle one root from the next without ripping them apart. The roots had to remain intact or the plants would die.

My hands have extra lines, creases dividing and subdividing my palms and fingers into separate territories so dirt sticks easily there.

I placed the silver lace, free of tangling roots, into its own new pot, tucking extra soil around the base, so the roots could grow, spread out like interstates across a map.

Puncture Wounds (zuihitsu)
Note: Some lines from this poem were harvested from “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash

Kevin cut himself washing dishes, badly, his knuckle punching through a pint glass, slicing a triangle of skin sliding down the drain. How bad is it? I saw white, heaved. Shoving a mess of paper towels against the bright blood, grabbed my keys, swallowing vomit hard out the door.


A pack of crows is called a murder.


Go tell that long-tongued liar.
Go and tell that midnight rider.


Winter in Iowa a painting of a black-and-white photograph of a Victorian house, haunted. Stark bare trees dark grey against the lighter clouds.


The sounds of crows being tortured pierced the freezing night as we left the emergency room: shrill, long aching calls, cawing like cats or monkeys against unseen violence. My hands shook without gloves as I read to him the symptoms of infection: tell me if you feel feverish.


I thought I heard the shuffle of the angels’ feet.


Along I-35 South to Des Moines, snow pools, revealing bumps and curves I couldn’t see in summer.


Two crows picking at the flat body of a road-killed squirrel, its matted grey-orange coat speckled with blood dry and dull. The sharp white of a protruding tendon or bone. I cock my head at the silhouette crows waiting in the branches above me. Keep walking.


I pass a billboard of the crucifixion: “Jesus, the ONLY way to God.” Blood leaks out around metal nails hammered into the delicate wrists.


Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news.

Lost Boys


Once, when I was seven, I think
I saved a boy’s life.

He laid unconscious, blood tinting the brook rusty orange,
The cold water rippling around his forehead.

We’d fought with twig swords,
Dueling Peter Pans on our fallen tree bridge

Until he slipped off the mossy wood and fell,
Forehead cracking against the muddy brown bark.

I ran out of Neverland panting, braids bouncing,
Calling for grown-up help.

He got stitched seven times and
Praised for big boy bravery.

But still, two years later,
He lied to his mother about

The black eye I gave him
For calling my sister a cow,

Made up a story about a bully
Boy on the basketball court throwing elbows.

Didn’t want to admit he got punched—
Or saved—by a girl.

And still, in another four years,
It was I who bled rusty orange dripping

Every month into the toilet thinking
I don’t wanna grow up.