It began as a gift to a friend. Every week I would mail a photo to poet, Meghan Sterling, in Maine. She would respond with a poem, and mail both to our mutual friend in Oregon. 

It quickly became a gift to myself. 

I hadn’t fully considered how wonderful it would feel to share an image with someone, and receive such a genuine response. how it would feel to have sparked the creation of art in an entirely different form. how it would feel to begin a conversation, without the use of a single word. 

Two years later, and we are still making these photo poems. You can sign up to receive them in your own inbox (and soon mailbox!) here. . 

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The Hellbine We Are

How the morning is nearly swallowed by rain, the world

is nearly drowned, our porch floors tacky with sweat and

peeling paint, our feet hairy with unswept dirt. O, summer

and its bold heady strangling— knotweed, bindweed, mushrooms

in the grass, all of our newly sprouted hairs along the red

of our lips. What are we clinging to, this nation with its lighted

windows, its bus routes, parking lots, shifting tectonic plates.

Beneath dirty feet, we can feel the hum of the earth churning

its bones, grinding its teeth as it sleeps. There are deep forests dense

with rain and air and the mist where they meet. Parasitic fungi sleeping

under bellies of rotting logs. Hellbine wrapping its wiry arms around

the ivy understory, drinking the fresh green blood, lighting it gold.

How much we take from this place. How we convince ourselves

that the taking makes it beautiful. How our taking stinks of the kill.

Because July Has Been Storm

& song, the fields emptied of their fires

as though God’s own hands have lifted

the sluices: the air scented with potatoes,

thinly sliced & fried in fat: the fourth of this

month: o what we herald: the divisions between

bodies: between outdoors & indoors crumbling:

the water world and the damp seeping into the ceiling

and windowsills: peeling paint in long wet strips:

my daughter: quiet beside the window fan: breathing

into blades: her voice a blurred stutter: o say can you see:

my daughter: learning anthems: sliding across the tarp

sprayed by the hose: I didn’t ask my daughter to know:

she has come to want the sensation of slipping: she has come

to want to lie in wet grass: beneath silver sky: still as a garden

snake: she has come like her grandparents to find harbor in

the field: the boat of her body set sail: across the rest of her life

How To Be the Hero In Your Own Life

Tell everyone about your grandmother,

the way she held your hands to her lips.

The way your daughter does too, pressing

her mouth to your fingers as she falls asleep.

Book the trip, no matter how low your bank

account. Picture your daughter seeing a volcano,

a puffin, the endless rough face of the North

Atlantic. Wear the sequins. Wear the hat. Do

good work but not too much. Make peace with

what others can give. With what you can give.

Burn your old beliefs down to ash. Make new ones.

Walk everywhere. Be that person everyone sees walking.

Watch the spring unfurl its secret lace. Stop to look at fallen

petals. See how they shape themselves into a halo of light.

Moon Jellyfish 

Something was sleeping inside the sea, 

rising, rising like an opal, like a dream, 

and beneath the dreaming was more water, 

clear as a moon I once saw from the deck 

of a ship. No cities. No islands. No anchor 

to the familiar world. Its wants. Its strange

longings. Touch and belonging. Here, there

was air like the fingers of an invisible lover.

There was an occasional seabird calling as it 

searched for fish. All was softness like the alula 

of a wing—clouds, sky with its membrane of light, 

waves and their secrets. Then there was this moon, 

rising in the water. The moon with its promise of forgetting. 

What did I want to forget? Myself. My incessant self. 

Antiphony of the Crone

where are you from

the earth’s blue 

mouth

What do you know

what I knew before

what did you find

the stars the sea

the scent of your

neck the pulse of your

blood

what did you feel

how the scent of you took

me back into the garden

of the child of my child 

your hand salted as

your eyes

what do you want 

for us to become

to grow the greenest 

grass the bluest

plums to taste

the ripe pears on 

your tongue

what is your fear

how the teeth of the earth

can tear things apart

where will you go

when you have gone

inside your very flesh

and the flesh of your

child 

how do you know

where you go, I will 

follow

Caution

We have embraced an attitude of survival: 

At school, in the street, in costume. Kill or 

be killed. Eat or be eaten. How Dios de Los 

Muertos is now a vigil for the recently fallen. 

All of us preparing and never prepared for danger. 

All of us armed for battle. The streets decorated 

with unironic caution tape. The streets decorated 

in families’ tears. O, the heart’s ragged weather. 

How it followed us out trick-or-treating. It was 

raining, so we brought an umbrella. It was raining, 

but the sky cleared into pink smoke. Haywood Avenue 

soft with puddles, the princesses and pumpkins and sharks 

of the world holding out their candy bags. The bright world 

their oyster, the bright world waiting with its chocolate pearl. 

// more photo poems here //

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