A suite of poems from 1993, which have never seen the light of day till now. It was one of those terrifying years when I leapt from a cliff without a net, into another life. I wrote these for my lover while we were separated by work for three months, p …

I bought this vase because

I have a thirst for friends who are not men: A girl who will look up from pablum or the wash And, with a kind of certainty of trust, Will talk to me of what is beautiful again;

Shadows of the city’s crosses rippled on the crowd that fled the square. My mother, on my back, told beads. They dropped into my collar, jiggled on my neck. The autumn was so warm that year! My neighbors, moving through the streets, stopped sometimes a …

the bones of the forest watching the lips of the river icing the skin of the freeway cracking the corpse of the big house steaming the arms of the weather reaching the heart of the country waiting the eyes of the winter closing   Linda Frye Burnha …