To Break a Heart It’s his first day of playoffs. Gold and black cleats. A run to stands before the game to tap his grandmother on the shoulder, smile saying, Watch me crush it, and then as fast as Nolan Ryan’s yellow hammer, he’s back with his team huddling with Coach…

—after Frida Kahlo’s Memory (Mexico) 1937 Heartbreak moves with no wind and no water, little light, and not much life. Heartbreak is a stiff dress on the clothesline, suspended in silence. At onset, heartbreak feels like one foot on land, one in the sea. Or heartbreak…

Angel or Demon? —a haibun in winter We exited the elevator at the medical center and suddenly, he was upon us like a zone-tailed hawk. Don’t I know you? Where are you from? I know you. Do you remember me? He never let up, his gold- tooth smile as inviting as the shiny…

 —with Seamus Heaney’s definition of hope Winter is the soul shrinking like the last orange in the lead-glass fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, and it’s the scattering of stale bread on the hard brown ground for the robin who might come hop, hop, hopping along….

You’re Still the One —after Shania Twain’s song by the same title. who breaks out in song though you only remember a phrase or two, and you’re still the one who riffs the opening verse of House of the Rising Sun on the guitar that’s been part of the basement…

  -after George Ella Lyons I am from tenant farmers, from mules and corn-filled wagons. I am from swamp and river- muddy, rushing, speaking life. I am from cotton bloom and boll, representing work and survival, from burlap sack and scale, the gin that mined the…

—after C.S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory and Gustav Klint’s Longing for Happiness (Austria) 1901 Happiness is toasted marshmellows, coconut macaroons, oily macadamia nuts and Paris rain. Front porch swings, putty in a child’s hands, icy moon drops, and soft jazz….

Some things never leave you, like the taste of strawberries in summer. Like your father saying you thought yourself the Queen of Sheba and a few years later escorting you down the rose-petaled aisle as if you were. Like the swaddled and wonder-eyed innocence, peaking…

—after Joyce Sutphen and Thomas Lux Because he got twice the money and his name in the paper, he would pick two hundred pounds of cotton per day to have the first bale ginned in the county. Because years later he would pass a field of white and say, I’d like to get…

  Here’s to the unexpected, the surprises that come our way—the Christmas card that arrives on the Ides of March, the rain burst on a sky-blue summer day, a poem that births itself in minutes at the coffee shop. Here’s to the unexpected— the music of blackbirds…