POEMS ONLINE:

"Language Lessons," American Life in Poetry, Summer 2009

"Hurricane Season," Valparaiso Poetry Review, Spring 2008

"Adjectives of Order," Slate, Summer 2007

"Levels," Verse Daily, 2005

"House Guest," Poetry Daily, 2005

"What I Know For Sure," 32 Poems, Fall 2003

AUDIO:

"Dead Reckoning," The Notre Dame Review, Summer 2008

"English Fundamentals" The Notre Dame Review, Summer 2008

"Performative Language" The Notre Dame Review, Summer 2008

SELECT POEMS from Mortal Geography :

Present Perfect

My students understand better
if I draw a timeline—horizon

with two ends, shorthand
for anything short of infinity.

I mark the brief rules of past,
present, future; arc a line

linking the past and now: the tense
with a name so lovely

and misleading we’d all like
to describe (stepping out

onto my third-floor landing;
pigeons swooping over chimneys

like pigeons in every time; the hills
massed into lilac clouds; the vertigo

of sky opening at eye level;
scattered lights of lives

carrying on their private
anchorage) something entirely

and not-that-much different
from perfection. As I have lived

all my life in this world, and still
it surprises me. Why not

I lived in this world? Gratified
each time someone answers,

In the second, you lived
in the past, but you’re standing

up there in the present, too, alive.

The Heartland

In the beginning was snow, fluffy and colored
like cabbage. Pale green leaves of light
folded in toward the ground.

We who were from nowhere
changed zip codes often, moving
into uncertain weather. The sameness of change

never ceased to astound us. Blocks away,
the American Ice Company’s red bricks
melted to white. It was possible to believe

a whole city’s snow came from inside.
Sidewalks turned into tightropes. The sky waited.
We all had something we’d rather stayed buried.

We all had something staked on the thaw.
One morning, the mailbox backed up
with forwards, which overflowed

down the steps. We’d been located by names
that chapped our lips when we said them.
Ice hung from the gutters of the art museum

like sculptures. People paid to stay outside.
Shovels made soft sweeps, brushes
across the unalterable, as men poured salt

to our doorstep, a great evaporated sea.
The papers tallied up deaths
and reported freezing was variable.

In Houston, people start dying
when the temperature drops below thirty,
while in Anchorage, death starts

at minus five. We had become
the midpoint of a mortal geography.