1. Start with a name / By the end of this pamphlet, you will be able to practice the art of waiting in three simple steps.

We’ve come to Des Moines for the funeral. Fitting / place: I’ve driven through every time I was leaving home to live / somewhere new.

The finest strand of dark green yarn / masquerades itself an accessory / wispy and frayed

This is how you keep your head down; this is how you thank God for this country: loudly so they hear / you;

The American dentist who shot Cecil the Lion once said, <em>If I had known this animal had a name … I obviously wouldn’t have killed it.</em>

in people. That whatever gods / I choose, I choose to love

I buy an old city bus, which will / whisk me away from this sinkhole I'm circling.

Last night I dreamt of / walking to Auger Beach / at dusk / only to find the tide / too high again:

"Maybe you are like me, and you’ve been thinking a lot about permanence."

"A river is a contested site. I return again and again to rivers, real and imagined."

"What are you shedding these days in order to become more yourself?"

"The media has fomented a moral panic — 'no one wants to work anymore' — when, more accurately, no one wants to work under these conditions anymore."

In this moment that has come to happen / in other moments, the notes / of birds nestled in my asking.

The new year begins in winter white embroidery— / trumpeter swans and needle-slim herons piercing / drainage ditches.

“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year.