I don’t want the smoke to be beautiful, but it is. My street is filtered in an orange glow; light diffuses through. It’s like stepping into one of those landscape paintings they used to sell at the mall, some dangerous nostalgia for a place and time that never existed. Soft and toxic, like foam.

I'm on the 11th hole of Colonial Terrace, and I smell a copy machine.

You know the smell. That sweet scent that wafts from warm paper? A copy machine. Outside in the woods! 

And where did that strobe light come from? This ain't a dance floor. . . .

The winter-bone-white sycamore with Halloween-witch branches holds the riverbank. Smaller bone trees line the opposite bank, keeping dirt back from the river’s pull. . . .

i don’t want to write about the end. today, 
instead, i’ll write about the fawn, this fawn,
sunspots feigning light streaming through
filtering leaves as he lies still. . . .

We plod up the steep avenue of Entrada Sandstone / with other tourists, turn a right corner and there it stands, / the Chaps. Evan is in another teenager mood. . . .

That night, the fire leapt to burn the flurries right out of the air. The coals didn’t even hiss. It was the kind of silence that only comes with snowfall, which piled in drifts against the brick walls of the house and the sturdy bases of our longleaf pines. . . .

During my first Montana summer, a season in which snowfall and seventy-degree temperatures can occur less than a week apart, I drove three hours north from Missoula to West Glacier to hike the Hidden Lake Trail. It was the first of July. . . .

My daughter speaks snowfall and mating elk 
and tree tree tree. When she is angry at me, 
she speaks crow and dinosaur and the echo 
that fills a forgotten well. I try to answer. . . .

The cage is opened, and all at once a pelican emerges from the back of a pickup truck parked on Wrightsville Beach.

It’s thirty degrees too hot as I slide off lift one and skate a sugary white strip to Porcupine. A week earlier than planned, and a week after my old-timer partners in crime called it quits.

Show me the rainbow in the wet concrete as snow falls at United Dairy Farmers, my college town restless in the night. The drink is wearing off. . .

Lunar New Year, and every time I write or read / the phrase “fire horse,” I see “fire hose.” / I wonder what the year will bring, / its chronic inflammation and bright / tendency to self-immolate

Dad is fishing behind me, a memory clipped / right out of the scrapbook of girlhood. / Flicking a small fly: in out in out in out.

Louisiana dog and her snow-sweater, her stretch-marked heart, far / removed from the days of filling belly with grass to stave the hunger

The weight of the world feels so heavy today but I’m standing on the shore of Lake Michigan and the sun is out for the first time in days. I walk past people sitting in their cars, pointing them toward the setting sun, windshields tinted orange.

The sun floats down a half inch. We are in love, on a walk. / As we cross the parking lot for unlucky students, you ask me / what my ideal world would look like if the good guys won.

I’m drenched in the wetness of the cool air, my glasses streaked from the remnants of the rain spitting at me before I got in the river.

It is empty here, by the bay, cold and still and dusted white with snow. But I hear you on the wind before my eyes land on your cracked shore, soaked in algae.