smiling with lipless mouths, winking with lidless eyes their brittle bones clacking and clattering in an ancient percussive rhythm

Death's route is serpentine, winding in and out of dreams and memories like a river moving across the land.

You asked where God is and meant it as sincerely as your nightly request for a glass of water by the bed.

Bid me come, and free my feet...

Morning swells like a leaven as I follow my hunger

He observes every ant, every roly poly, every gnat. A rock is an occasion.

Standing in the dark, searching the night sky for meteor streaks, I hear a deer whuff distress

I freeze-frame the glacial way he’d rise from his recliner, brace against his walker to greet me— when, in his day, he’d crave a ticket an

An orchard has many seasons, each tree its sequence of life following a dormancy masked as death.

And now I find myself between two deaths, longing to live more fully, awaiting a body not discarded but renewed.

I’m sitting next to a man missing the tips of his ears like they were bitten or ripped off he can’t see too good either...

I start where I was borne out of my sadness, the Maine coast where the veil was lifted and I could suddenly see again...

If bodies are more than spirit vessels, what then was the bird: Messenger? Message?

let my poetry live out loud among starfish and coral,

Each day in between my shadow blurs the water’s edge, a raven perched in my throat

Nothing is chosen that weighs them down -- no over-stuffed closets, no unrealistic promises

by Justin Lacour If today for work i step into this hospital room where a stranger is dying and the television is on no one is watching...

by Karen Gookin Those nudges make more sense now, seem real and recognizable— as clear as the red-winged blackbirds following alongside...

The mist of morning shreds in streams Revealing hints of sky...

I can hold it, cup its six pounds in my hands, feel its rough, hard mass and trace the hewn path