It was a crisp day when I boarded at Novosibirsk, the sort of weather that gives everything sharp lines. I would like to say it was 1963. I know only that it was the beginning of the period of stagnation. …

I was nineteen the first time. I had ghosts in my head and they wanted tall rocks; they wanted cold water. I applied to be a housekeeper in a hotel from the 1920’s in a national park in Alberta. The closest city, Calgary, was three hours away. Good. There I…

I do some magical thinking in Bangkok: You are not in the apartment, boiling rain drills the windows, inside some pots, myself, red-eyed and odd in the mirror. I scribe line after line into a 20 baht journal Running the pen like a knife. Precision is key For Manifesting the Unreal, I…

I used to tend bar with three blondes, all different decades, oh we’d HOWL laughter and little particles of vodka would trade in the air, enter our throats in nanoscopic rituals And the men would come with split-face smiles warbling to little things on their arms, little frail things, of three decades…

[Long-listed for Augur Poetry’s upcoming issue] What I saw was a sort of drowning. A woman across the room with an underwater face. I wasn’t about to reach in to grab anything. …

2014 In the waiting room Ryan can tell that I do not want to get blood taken. He brushes my hair out of my swollen eyes, taps my leg and tells me stories about living in a hospital in Whitehorse. Blurry faces of old, wiry prostitutes sharing joints with him…

Three hours pass and we hit the curve of the road; there’s a high red wall on our left and eternal green space on the right. Birds scream. …

The rug in my Grandparent’s basement was speckled deep red and brown. It was so thick you could stick your fingers into it up to your knuckles. And we did, my sister and I, as babies, as toddlers, reaching downwards into the beginning of the Earth. …

you go far away. bring little. sometimes the steps you take feel like away from. you bring little so you leave summer clothes in chile and winter clothes in bolivia and you hope the woman who finds them smiles or is cold. the salkantay feels like a pilgrimage to a…