Inside the dead of winter
Curls a fiery soul
A little bear that sleeps defiant
Waiting out the cold.

A gallop through the forest without stopping under the moon, but you don’t know how you know such a thing. You angle your neck and groan and scratch your budding antlers on the tree. They grew from your head in moments like a handshake at a stockholder meeting, in the second it takes to snatch a champagne glass from a waiter and what is a stockholder?

The house-thief strikes
When I lay the scissors down,
Vanishing them under whatever scarf
Is most forgettable.

The exterminators wove their bags from the vodka strength of the noonday sun, killing the shadows straight off when they stuffed them in the bags. But Culver wove his bags from the strands of dawn, from when the first few beams trailed across the fields, not too bright, but just bright enough that they couldn’t slip through the stitches.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

When Jan reached four years into sixty, his daughter and her son flew off into the glorious first exploration past the Milky Way to somewhere called Z-1.

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

We point at a field of cows as we pass and say “Cows,” for as everyone knows, the bovine population has a deal with all travelers. 

The purring rumbles throughout the cathedral room. It is loud, but not the horrible, bright kind of loud that bars or doctor’s offices have. This is a cozy loud.

Catherine didn’t much care for her job. It wasn’t that the squirrels gave her any lip. They had dental plans, 401Ks, and the whole caboodle after all. The Sound, though, that gave her the shudders.

Evelyn was on the way to her big meeting with the department heads, but the box of kittens on the side of the road read ‘take what you can’ and what was a middle-aged woman to do? Leave them? 

​Of course the freaking not.