Dorothy Neagle

“To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. ”

— Marguerite Duras

Aug 3
Aug 3 Lewy Body and the Nightjar

He forgot bones until / he broke one. I forgot / names until they were called.

May 27
May 27 Reliquary for Breadcrumbs

now I want to know what life is like with all my hunger / showing

May 27
May 27 Reliquary for the River

time is the most painful of all the hungers / because it is never satisfied

Dec 3
Dec 3 The Arborist Repents

each summer for ten years / he planted one thousand trees

Aug 21
Aug 21 The First Thing I Give Up

there is the white belly of a hawk bending / over the ford dealership on central avenue

Jul 17
Jul 17 Black Bird Red

raven is out in the cherry tree, swallowing busily

Jul 17
Jul 17 Arson

if the wind was down, you could hear / tires on gravel from a mile back / standing outside our house

Jul 17
Jul 17 Ode to the Cocklebur

I have / picked you from bodies, finger-brushed the crumbling / petals of your shed housings

Jan 9
Jan 9 Smoke and Beeswax

it’s such a pale gray the body / of a person broken down / into ash

Sep 27
Sep 27 In Tobacco Country

these days I settle for a contact high / off the taste of all the lies I swallowed

Mar 1
Mar 1 My Mother's Teeth

I went back to the diaries on my knees / as if I was looking for something

Mar 1
Mar 1 Ghazal for Andromeda's Daughter

My mother died and I rewrote her.

Mar 1
Mar 1 Ariadne Slays the Minotaur

Sometimes when I descend the stairs, I carry sugar cubes in my / sweating palms and barely escape with blood on my knuckles.

Dec 1
Dec 1 Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

having in common oblivion / disguised as transition / their bodies, in water, became new to one another.

Dec 1
Dec 1 Life Cycle of a Hawk

my house is ready for you / to beat your wings against its cage

Aug 5
Aug 5 The Wizard of Obscenity

The art monster ate my second baby / and the third and fourth one after that. / I wrote their flesh away in pen and ink, / my paper powdered with the fine bone dust / of their white teeth.

Apr 29
Apr 29 I Feel Pulled

by the lazy / fisherman of my / mother’s ghost. She / pulls me gentle. / She pulls me / slow.

Apr 29
Apr 29 Seeing in the Dark

She likes to go out in the darkness / and make soft sounds, her slip-on Keds kneading / the gravel…

Apr 29
Apr 29 The Mythology of the Call Girl

thirteen is patience, fourteen a chore, fifteen the / mirror for sixteen, who went out dressed like a whore

Dec 22
Dec 22 The Snakebite Cure

I SLIPPED OUT / CLAD IN GARLIC SKIN, PUT ONE FOOT / IN THE FOREST AND IT MADE NO SOUND.