Train Horn Clairvoyance I need them,the train horns, every day. Whether it’s the low distant groan of slow freight or right next to me,blasted through my head, they pull me up through the gutter water the thick veneer of human spoilto a clearing, not a place but sound that shreds all physical matter,tearing through bodylike god speaking and I have to rememberwe invented them. Reliably when I’m sickened by life and people,worn to an outline,I’ll hear its clairvoyance, and though I only halfway understand,I can’t disobey its rage,its command to defy any and all. Then the locomotive shakes pastour frozen hallucinationand I’m saved, I’m whole, I’m sane.   Catherine French…

Giving Notice A day can be picked up,a few weeks later,like a warm drink in a paper bag. I had driven to the conservancyto move alone on the hillunder the hawks’ thermals, the sky a blue bone,a tight curvature over the lesser arcof the meadow, its dried, bleached stalksand old grass.Through this brittleness, the Eastern bluebirdwas the deeper mover, darting,making his rhythmic plush. June Sketch On the back porch, my husbandgets ready to cut my hair,a tenderness discovered by accidentduring the lockdown. He dusts my bangsfrom my eyes, then leans inand uses a voice I knowas my mother’s.                        …

Widow’s Weeds The winter’s exit was earlier than usual,perennials nosing through the dirt, sunlightlike a healing hand, bird-silence erased in fitful songs. My widowed motherspends her declining years gardening,her husband long planted like a bulb, her children windcast seeds. Her friends mostly underground. Time is that sunlight a door closes on.Dressed in an old blue down coat, faded jeans, gloves, spattered white tennis shoes,she loves the simplicity of weeding,her arthritic fingers dig at their tenacity. Each troublesome root-mass gets a good shakethe way regret, unabsolved, works at her,what she’d said to her children, her husband. She digs on dirty knees until the wheelbarrow’s fulland spills on the grass. When the sweat…

Typewriter The man with his hands on his hips standing in the center of the room cannot find his mother’s typewriter. It is months after her passing and he’s angry at himself for not thinking of it sooner but the damn thing has to be somewhere. She used it for letters and memos and outlines of plans and typed his college essays on it, too. He loved the off-center keys and how certain letters appeared to be caught on the battleground between her and whatever war needed fighting. Her fingers wore the ink off those keys. He misses her voice, its drawl and delight. That machine held her voice in…

For Sean When I was a boyI was so often on a plane in the empty skybetween my parentsin the indistinct careof flight attendants that when I handed youover to the systemof the hospitalit felt like Ihad put you on a plane I imagined yousmall in your seatwatching a screenwatching the cloudsthe nation belowlike a pincushion where were you goingin that thin bright airI walked to the vending machinesthey made a darkkind of center the smallness I wasin those hourswas what I’d thoughtmy parents becamewhen I was gone I tried to readin my vinyl chairwhile you were therein that parentless place but also insidethis bit of my childhood which couldn’t…