Excerpts from Heating the Outdoors

You’re the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart

It’s just impossible you won’t be back
to quench yourself in my crème-soda
ancestral spirit

*

Still, I wish we'd poached again, that you’d laced up my
fur in your fingerless gloves, that you’d wrung out my
heart like mounting a pelt to a frame. I’d have shown
you I can smile at myself as a carcass of the word
dread.

*

In the village we watch each other live; we turn to all
the cars that pass; we mark, with orange flags on the
edges of dirt roads, all the places we left our beliefs.

Translated by Kristen Renee Miller.