Poetry

You’re slightly odd-looking: neither as pretty as you imagine nor even as normal-featured. Your permanent eyebrows arch significantly when you lol followed by snort and nasal flare, your ears sloping unevenly down

The former tenants of this planet left behind housewarming gifts: blueprints for birds and alligators. Dinosaurs should get credit for more creatures, house cats, stick bugs, the Loch Ness monster, armadillos. If every

Gazing at an early reader, memories of that first illumination burst tangibly through white spaces. Pictures, senses, impressions escape a flat slab, summon a river of thought-clouds. Lest the comic opportunities distract you

Here hear the clock: the tick the tock the tick The swing of pendule swung by gear-dinked chimes, Or quartz hum the pulse that clicked the quick Escape of the wheel to regulate

at wooden desks, our blank composition books exuding their distinctive freshness. Not translation nor transliteration— heaven forbid “original work.” Like the abbots of old, our first-grade teachers knew: there is a rest that