In the North Country, there are blues so perfect / you want to tear your heart out to be alive / and sober.

On the playground I strum guitar while my daughter dangles upside down from the bar above the tall slide, and inside my middle-aged brain a movie plays.

I believe it was either forever or an eight / no longer lazy on the page, / because things took longer after that, / had longer lifetimes, / and that was their sign in continuous curls.

I wish the wild mint would bake its scent into my skin, / and I could drag it behind me, as if it were a train of silvery lace. / It never does, and that’s okay.

She says, “To write poetry about sacred spaces, I must understand what I mean by sacred spaces, il faut comprendre premièrement ce que je veux dire par Terre Sacrée.”

What I’m asking is will watching The Discovery / Channel with my young black boy instead / of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests / riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him / from harm?

In our house, nobody ever danced, / even though my father played Elvis / or Johnny Cash from the silver / CD player that rested on the nook

Hot summer and birds pillage garbage cans, / squabbling for scraps. / With ripped jeans and knotted hair, I follow / the unpaved road to town.

My socks are small trash bags, / and the street number of my house is zero. / Garbage cans are my walls on winter nights.

These sheep have no choice either / though even in summer / they still want to hear the truth