Eagle Plain

When others run to windows or out of doors
To catch the sunset whole, he is content
With any segment anywhere he sits.

From segment, fragment, he can reconstruct
The whole, prefers to reconstruct the whole,
As if to say, I see more seeing less.

A...

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...

we are not that kind of country.

We are sanctuary for the hungry,

the homeless, the huddled,

held together by an idea

our immigrant fathers believed in.

Rendered, it meant independence.

Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,

a fighting chance. Forty thousand

musket balls, by themselves, did not

shape the...

Come in, Maxim!... This is Minsk
choked under a pillow of clouds.
 
There’s you: a statue in a heavy coat.
Here all monuments wear coats
 
not wool, but linden bark coats
with bee fur collars.
 
In their pockets monuments keep belts.
And under collars monuments have necks.
 
In...

We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.

We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...

It is winter in Anchorage, and I am only as tall as the shoveled snowbanks in the parking lot of the pink apartments. I am old enough to have chores but young enough not to fully understand frostbite. It is...

Home is a sound.
 I can hear it
in the western meadowlark, the inlaid rocks in my driveway,
 in the accent and slang
of my mom’s voice.
 It’s engrained
 in her stretched vowels,
in her smashed-together words, in her
 hard Rs,
and in the word rez.

I grew up hearing...

Sometimes, m’s elongate,
grow long tongues to taste the last bit 
of breath my body has to offer.

Sometimes, i’s echo 
like the harsh cries of a seagull, 
try to fly far away from the nest of my mouth
only to circle the ocean of my...

My first instinct is to translate
the word. Make it easier to understand
without saying the word itself.
I feel guilt for this mistake—
for changing languages instead
of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out?
My mother and I are playing charades
alone. We make this...

This disease has come back
With frills and furbelows.

You must give your whole life to poetry
Only a few survive if that—

Poems I mean, paper crumpled
Shades of another water—

Far springs are what you long for,
Listening for the slow drip of chemicals

Through a...

It’s true: I almost never
smile, but that doesn’t mean
 
I’m not    in love: my heart
is that black violin
played slowly. You know that
 
moment late in the solo
when the voice
is so pure    you feel
the blood in it: the wound
 
between rage
and complete surrender. That’s
where...