At thirteen, she wanders
fields near razed homes in Bucha,
hears echoes of cries eerie
in shattered walls. She shelters
in hollows of a hospital turned home.
Once upon a time, she was a child
with eager eyes in search
of trinkets in a greenhouse—

in this poem i will assess all the winding routes to betterment

examine my inner workings
and optimize them
make another list
a financial report
break down my existence into simple word problems

if the world continues on
long enough, past
you and me and everyone
we know, will every
house be a house
where someone famous once
lived, every home a museum, except maybe ours

The waitress didn’t call me honey when she set down my bowl of clam chowder
but said she liked my cheap sunglasses,
and looked at me strangely when I made some graceless joke about them,
utterly unprepared for a compliment

My hanging basket of geraniums dies
on my front porch, soil in a pot
surrounded by three sides of bricks.
I leave for work, come home every day,
thinking I should clean this thing out,
put something new in its place.

In a low-slung stone building
commas return like monks, slightly
drunk after sipping Trappist Ale.
They have taken a vow of silence
and do not hum between titles of hymns,
films, foreign phrases and blessings.

Conjure a faun in the middle of field.

There’s a cabin in the distance, homespun
& brown, & the thick-torso’d wild turkeys
march a few feet away, leaving dinosaur
tracks in their wake.

Don’t let any of this stop you.

The smoke runs thin
by mid-morning

The river is once again
worth waking for

I approach the water,
spread my arms,

wade,
then rise