In Iraq I said that word so much, heard it so often. I came home and found myself still saying it. Shrapnel's shell was first used against the Dutch at Surinam (now Guyana). The Dutch were so taken aback by the weapon that they surrendered after only the second time it was fired.

Vexed light on dune evening primrose. The mineral lands denuded, / this still hurts.

From the bleachers I watched them / watch you (multiplying, it seemed) / running sprints in heat / across the grass, / standing in for X's and O's.

She says, Maybe I am not, in fact, ill. The ends of all her sentences curve upward into questions. We reduce her medication with a warning: Bipolar I is a lifetime diagnosis, though we concede that perhaps Patient could do with a smaller dosage.

The yellow powder blankets my car as thick as the snow that never falls here. For the first time in thirty years, I am allergic. Everyone smokes for comfort and so grows the communal cough.

Frayed hymn, but faded. Unsown / threads turned toothy-tough — a gift / of wild roadside seedheads gone / gunmetal with dirt-freckled rain.

On the ice floe they pretended they were on a white sand beach / The trail guide had really screwed up / Earlier he had pinched a thistle and paid the consequences

And the cloud that took over the family’s house that Tuesday wasn’t made of your run-of-the-mill water vapor. It was so humid and heavy you could reach out and shake hands with it, and it would grab your hand and shake back.

in a place where one grass blade makes / the next grass blade’s shade / that grass blade made / the next grass blade’s root

How easy it was, once, to imagine our future children. The blueprints were right in front of us, waiting to be brought to life. We envisioned them, tiny replicas of ourselves, as all couples surely do when they are “trying.”

The more I looked at her the more she seemed angry. This was probably because I was breaking into John’s computer again.

The retreating autumn deepens in the city. Water turns from silver to maroon. A fisherman smokes on the bank, looking at the rising tide. The dark tones in the landscape are often overlooked. The bank, grey in the fog.

When she got a paper cut, that speck seemed newly foreboding—she’d lick it off, heart accelerating, as if to let it pool for even a moment would invite some deviously patient menace.

The arcade I lived in was the cryptograph, more or less. / The dog named Mila demanded evidence of the crowd. / You rented a room in the hotel by the sea.

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

Still, she liked what she had become. She slept in a den of sticks of her own making. Language and its judgment escaped her. Was being animal closer to God than innocence? Her voice was her breath. She was still alive.

This review of zürich moves! 2019, an annual festival for contemporary arts practice in performing arts, was a runner-up in the 2019 Toni Beauchamp Prize for Critical Art Writing, judged by Jessica Lynne.

Vexed light on dune evening primrose. The mineral lands denuded, / this still hurts.

How to enter my own waking so that I might feel alive. I often want / to lay down in the snow now. To be a little numb, at first, / as I’ve been since I gave birth & my bones became trestles / yielding other worlds.

At sixteen, life is supposed to be safe. Things are supposed to be beginning. We are supposed to be weaning from the care and guidance of people who have raised us. We are supposed to be on the brink of our adult lives. We should be taking the reins and figuring out how to care for ourselves, and we should have our most basic needs met so that we can care for others. It’s a volatile, dizzying, restless age. It is not always sweet.

So much goes on without it baffles every time I begin. I read, I go walking. I take long routes past the elementary school, the fidgety, nebulous line at the crosswalk and the swingsets quaking and singing.