Map with Scrimshander
I didn't stop to ask whether it was even legal— in hindsight, I should have—but I was distracted by this poem, flashing its fins on the cobblestones. Like most miracles, I was the only one who saw it. You had your monocle and your salt- soaked fishing vest fixed on the desk…
Gravity
Twice now, I've said it and she has not moved. And so I start to think about turtles: their balancing acts, the repetitive downward sloping of their shells. They have beaks, not teeth, so they chew in circles, lower jaws thrown into orbit. She looks down at her plate and doesn't say, I'm…
Map with Silt
"With what apparent eagerness a black woman seized some dirt from off an African yam, and put it into her mouth; seeming to rejoice at the opportunity of possessing some of her native earth.” —Alexander Falconbridge, British surgeon of the Middle Passage As we waited for our baby…
A Chip off the Old Block
Most of Mia's classmates had four grandparents; a few, two or three. Mia just had one, hard-shouldered and wooden, her seventh birthday present. "It's a grandparent, and," her mother announced, "it doesn't have batteries; love is all it needs." Carved from oak and polished…
How to Use a Freezer
Meatballs from your dad. The last ones. Before he died. Five years ago. Covered in frost. No label. No date. Don't eat them. Don't throw them out. This is what forever looks like when it fits in a drawer. — Next to your heart. Not metaphorically. Just location. Wrapped. Cold.…
Good morning.
Drink water. Thirst can masquerade as strength. Eat something real. Impulse weakens when the body is fed. Look at yourself briefly. Maintenance matters more than appraisal. Think about the day ahead. Do not add what is not there. Finish the smallest thing. Motion creates capacity. Do…
Delay
Due to an incident on S-train line A, trains are temporarily suspended. Copenhagen Central Station fills without moving. People adjust their bags. A child sits down. Replacement buses are being arranged. Someone says jumper. Someone says accident. Someone says nothing. Phones brighten, dim.…
Obituaries
The paper opens where my hands expect it. Coffee cools. Faces pass. Dates line up. One name. Born in the same year as someone I could call. A date follows. No photograph. Peter Møllebjerg Andersen is a Danish poet based in Copenhagen. His debut anthology The Edges of Copenhagen explores…
Interruption
The building is quiet. A printer wakes somewhere and goes back to sleep. A screen asks if I am still here. I click yes. The room accepts this. Peter Møllebjerg Andersen is a Danish poet based in Copenhagen. His debut anthology The Edges of Copenhagen explores urban life, absence,…
I Looked for Hope
in between the chrome and glass of the city's high-rises, those spaces where a crack of blue might split the smog-filled seams under loaves of day-old bread at the corner bakery, where through polished glass might lie, forgotten, one blueberry scone down the neck of an amber…
When Make-Believe Was Real
when a cardboard box could be a castle and a dragon could still be slain when knees were skinned in gravel while chasing robbers from the scene when crabapple trees held houses and honeybees were neighbors when ghosts haunted too-tall grass and fireflies lit up glass…
Seasonal Defeat
I wake up with winter sitting on my back smoking a cigarette. My arm reaches out to give the world some light, but winter takes a bat to the lamp, then blows a crash of fog into my face. I feel winter's hollow cackle in the depression of my chest as I try to get up from the…
A Vocabulary of Light
On happier Fridays, I cut loose my shoulder blades, take my knees out of retirement, and turn my hips into wild beasts. These nights God takes hold of my joints and bends the time of my tissues to let Catholic guilt out of mass early. I might roll, and wake, twirl and shake,…
It Took Me 44 Years To Notice This
When hours of snowing first stops, the world looks the cleanest it's ever been, and suddenly winter becomes a beginning instead of the ending we created because we're so damn sure the cold has more in common with death than with our goosebumps wrapped in a…
The other two are up as well! Internet was being silly and links for them didn't get auto-posted to Bluesky.
Kill Deer
The Killdeer is the only bird that tries to make me feel guilty. It does this broken wing thing. It stoops low along the ground beneath the sage brush and lumbers awkward through the sand, its wings canted at a sick angle, its tail feathers splayed toward the sky, and it stumbles out…
Dawn is also a kind of birth
the morning already loaded with the promise of thunder, though some raw heat holds it back, pushes the day's anger back down its gullet an Adam's apple of a cloud ominous with unspoken words a pregnancy – the irony hanging taut between us every sky an embryo we choose…
Flower Kisser
What seems mania to us, the whirling emerald stickpin, is life gathering gold in wildflowers, wings whirring, your quick tongue speaking the language of desire. Meadow by meadow. Nothing, not even the wind, can catch you. The owl, the peregrine falcon. And if we think you rush,…
From One Who Believes in Rain
I watch a fist of cloud punching at the sun, sparring, cornering it until the cloud knocks out fat raindrops that plop onto steaming sidewalk in front of my front porch where I lounge in a white, wicker rocker. Instantly, a drapery of rain, fastened to hooks of July's…
Budapest, or something like it
The coffee machine whistles and breathes out jets of steam like a locomotive. The elderly barman sets it going with the air of an engine driver pulling the cord of a train whistle. At the tables, card players lift their eyes from their hands and turn to look at the…
Fence Line
When cold comes, it sketches shivers down my back— thin, icy fingers precise. I sleep with my face in broken parts, a machete flattened under my pillow. I chewed my own roots, bit clean through, refused the lie of blossoming. Thawing is hardest. I gave up pieces to make my child whole.…
Under Water
In the dark, softness hums its ancient song— low animal, tongue behind velvet. Desire is one verse. Loneliness another— a rotten tooth lodged in the jaw of a man built like a warning. He was raised like a remote village, mostly unreachable. His father taught him to swim by dropping him…
BabiÄŤka
My very short grandmother— ate and ate after her boyfriend died. Dresses became pale-blue polyester sacks printed with white flowers, scratchy as guilt. Thick white stockings, sensible shoes. Communist hair dye, the colour of cheap Kool-Aid, bleeding orange and red frizz. She visited once.…
girl & the grief
i stopped drinking and i stopped starving myself years ago but the sudden rush of dopamine when my mother-in-law says that i have lost weight makes me almost relapse right there in her old kitchen cheap hotel slippers on at her insistence she claps a hand onto my arm and says even…
Academia
The water pump's playing up. Runs when it shouldn't, stops And starts again later. Fortunately, rain. Nightly nosebleed now Three weeks. Changes how We sleep but carmine Stars keep flaming Out. Stuff we drank Straight off the tank As kids somehow kills Us now without blinking. Tasted like…
