THE HICKEY

Its shape could be anything:

A fumbled divination.

A map of County Clare.

A shaman’s autograph.

Wax that seals the letter’s secret.

Otter’s coy wink.

Cupid’s lollipop.

The first And of the first question,

the else of the last.

Raspberry's inky font.

Aphrodite’s areola.

Rabbit’s panicked print.

Doubt's deaf ear.

A badge.

A curse.

Memory's smear.

A gobbler’s drooping snood.

Or the ghost of Pequot blood.

STOWAWAYS

A dog in Madrid

A dog in Dallas

The stories in our veins

Death watching us eat

Belgian railways

A hookworm

Body order

Gold and helium

Photographs that remember for us

A balloon bender

Blindfolds

Handwashings

A bow pulled back
Coral

Skates

Magic and contagion

Strangers observing strangers

Autophagy

Flour in France

A wedding dress

Straws of spaghetti

A place called Fish Town

Three or four assailants

A forensic scientist and a monologist

Three times daily

A rice truck

The need for armor

Circadian rhythms

A death in the Mississippi

Differential equations

The corner of a kitchen

Insults and ornamental plants

Shutters opening, shutters closing

Anthroturbation

All these and more

Are stowaways

In the ark of the earth

*Inspired by Harper’s Findings

SILK

There is a parenthesis

I wake with in my mind

in which the word leverage

wriggles like a pupa.

What do I do

with this?

Think tree, branch,

so I have a place

to hang it—

a place

among the leaves

to make silk?

BIRD STRIKE

A billionth of a chance.

But it happens.

That feather and bone

can down a plane,

during lift off or landing,

so close to home.

A travesty really.

Something emulated

destroys its imitation,

and by accident.

All it takes is one small body

to gum up the works:

for jet fan to turn on itself.

Blades breaking blades,

engine igniting, exploding.

A cascading effect—

that leads to carnage,

and to that thing of beauty–bird,

grace-in-flight—becoming

unrecognizable, and the music

of its names annihilated;

Greylag Goose, Gyps Vulture

Milvus Kite, Horned Lark,

Mourning Dove.

It is something else entirely.

What remains is the remains,

that the Smithsonian and its forensics

pick through and call snarge.

Seems a lot like shame.

All it takes is one small failure

to send the whole rig of self—bird,

plane, passengers—toward pulverization, catastrophe and a zoonosis of a different feather.