It was several months until we discovered the damage it had wrought.

It is not pleasant to be torn between two worlds you love.

I know what it feels like.

Propped up on my elbows, on the stiff gym floor. 

Planks: a climax in the battle to stay healthy.

Hands that once felt too small to lift burdens

are now clenched into fists

From the sky I saw endless gray rivers,

older than the cliché of arteries

We think it was a lit cigarette

flicked off the wrist of a driver, racing past

Once under the light of dawn

there sat a singing lark.

You think this poem will preserve the breeze,

preserve the dark and oaky trees

Pollen stuck to his thighs, the man feels 

something unnamable growing in his chest 

Ingrain yourself in a wild honey: flail a standing ovation with petaled hands

You cringe as the door opens with a loud beep, but no one comes running. 

Hope means understanding that, while there will be obstacles, we can still make change.

"Quark querk arck erk,"  

That's what the tui said.

Below

the cherry blossom clouds

Jeepney Smoke seeps through the iron rail

to keep him bloodshot. He burrows in the neck

I drink the elderflower air, 

poured by the 4am sky

Green are the strands of the winner's laurel;

green is the step of his podium as he stares over the crowd

I wasn't alive in '93, when cryptosporidium poured

through the water like liquid lava

At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds, 

first on one foot, then the other, in unison.

Of all the swimmer summer and the dust, sun, rain, you are what sticks out. 

He scuttled furiously from beneath the undergrowth, pausing every few seconds to catch his breath. 

They say 7 billion people stayed home today

2.2 billion children stayed out of school

125 miles.

I never imagined they could be so close. 

Sometimes I like to collapse infinity

into a single point in time I label "now."

And the sea has many teeth, far more than I. But if we are one 

then I have all the same teeth as the sea, then it has the same teeth as I. 

Air sticks to my skin, 

like honey. mosquitos circle my ankles and wrists

The grass stings my thighs and whispers at me to move my legs so that it may look upon the stars 

I try to think of death as an ocean; uncharted and unknown, but vast.

I look at you for decades and your words

melt in this subtropical heat.

i have come back

to the village i swore i would never see again

Perpetually sitting in a corner of my room is a large carrier bag filled with cast-off clothes.

Suburban living is a great, untested experiment. While this style of living . . .

There is a certain inscrutability in the mercurial ebb and flow of life in the woods, an unassuming cadence that settles just beyond my naive circumspection. The dry sweep of the wind’s touch is fond and insidious in turns . . .

On a frosty October morning, I walk to a field

And lie flat on my back in the dewy grass.