Stretch our hearts ample as a yawn,
so we might accommodate the double-
wide trailer of our neighbors’ grief

“Now, I must tell you of our grandeur,”
she’d written. “We are going to have
a Turkey!!! carpet in the dining room . . .

Rainstorms that blacken like a headache
where mosses thicken, and the mornings
smell of jonquils, the stillness

the thing I hankered after was no
rite but a foundation, the bedrock

And Denner: I shouldn’t like to be a man—
to cough so loud, and stand straddling about …

Beautiful beyond belief
to look at you the whole way
would be to walk away maimed

Susannah Harrison, “Songs in the
Night; By a Young Woman, Under Heavy
Afflictions,” didn’t touch him, but Morrison
Heady traveled by stage from Louisville
to touch Laura Bridgman, who
demanded that Helen Keller wash her hands. Helen
would later touch many of us but wouldn’t let us
touch her back.

an erasure of “The Letter” by “Currer Bell”

an erasure of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Old King’s New Jester”

Whatever interest
there was in
difference’s gone.