Really, what were the chances?

A plain stick match

scratches its sulfur contrail

across the iron griddle

of an enameled wood-stove.

It's pride to say that you

don’t regret anything,

Mayas chirping early in the morning.

When you are six years old, you learn from Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book that your cleft palate makes you hideous.

Cara looked out the office window at the black wrought iron fence surrounding the cemetery.

You flushed like a Maiden’s Blush apple when you unwrapped his gift.

I wear your face to the party.

Erin wanted to go down to the dog park again but Ann, Erin’s mother, couldn’t face it today.

She dreamt of stillness for her soul.

She thought at first it was dead – it lay flat in the middle of the garden, a triangle, its head lost in feathers.

It was difficult being a single dad — but even more difficult being a single dad to a vampire. 

This is the second time you meet the skinny teenage American.

i

can no longer 

fool myself

Orange blossoms fall from the trees, twirling like miniature cocktail umbrellas, slowly descending on hot air perfumed by summer as we drive underneath.

The gentle rain had started early that January morning, but by 3:00 that afternoon it had transformed our small family farm into an unrecognizable frozen landscape as the dropping temperature turned the rain to ice.

It was the autumn we left childhood behind.

When I died, she says, I didn’t.

Before I met you, I was a deer

trapped in a maze of skyscrapers,

headlights barreling around me

in every direction. 

She sat beneath the trees because she needed the darkness first.