“He raises one arm and you can’t tell if he’s pointing or offering his hand. Your clothes catch fire—you imagine both of you walking away from this alive. The burning man cocks his…

  “One little chicken shouldn’t cause/this much grief, Gary/says. There is no small grief,/I tell him, for all are/interconnected. One touch/sends tremors through our core/like the fly in the web/that wakes the spider…

“. . . and we float above the tallest of bone structures/ our heads tilt against the ceiling/ as we drink from the mouth of a whale/the last sliver of air/and I hum/and…

“You stoop to lay your/hand on exposed roots of the cherry tree you planted/ten years ago.  I feel your touch on some part of me/called nothing in this particular moment, called/emptiness by some…

“i wear a wedding dress/woven of queen anne’s lace/& wisteria. i slip a garter/of lichen off my thigh./i do not recognize, at first,/the effigy of desire:/burnt moss for hair,/putrid/bog breath./not every incandescence is…

“As she sips her cold beer, I my Irish,/ sweet Keats lies asleep peacefully nearby/ on a favorite tartan-covered chair,/oblivious of coronavirus./In previous incarnations, this cat/likely lived through countless outbreaks of these,/if not…

“When/Gullah/Geechee folk/meet at the sto’/they speak about how/to cook stone ground grits right./That 2:1 ratio./Instant is like the biblical/abomination. That ratio/reveals itself in refined spaces too/like/cheer squads . . . .”— Yvettte Murray…

“For once we’ll write a poem again to wrens to dales to does/to all the things that cannot read a page but read the loam,/the air flush inside their nares, the undulating atoms…

“We can eat contraband creek shrimp and Vicodin,/drink oysters steeped in white lightning./I can show you houses in glory and in decay,/show you pelicans above and dolphins below/our seven black rivers that flash/their…

“For such gifts, love (forgiving/their cost, and your digs at performers’ egos, and in hommage/to whatever shakes you wakeful at four a.m./on a May morning to gather a birdsong barrage)/I will bend my…