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I walked to the lake. I passed the Hooters, the Publix, the McDonald’s where I sometimes use the Internet to grade papers when my neighbor’s Internet is down. I passed the Wendy’s, and the Scottish Rites temple, whatever that is. When I got to the coffee shop, I ran into Vince and John and we…

What’s your whisper number, honey? Your point of roll- over or sell? Adrift you lumber, money pit and money doll, dispensing a sense of portly doom, exhaling a lost wherewithal. And yet you have advantages: too big to fail, you shake down squid—whole ecologies!—with stylish slaps of a trigger tail. What means ye by beaching,…

And didn’t I make you? Didn’t I shape the notes you bend your body round? Didn’t I tag your streets and cityscapes with hue? Even your style—which you think is yours— didn’t I hand it over, like something momma-made, big enough for you to grow into? My words in your mouth. The words you use…

To my young daughter, I sing the songs my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter, I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the 1960s. Now I know you’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again, it’s all the same…

Translated from Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author The history of the growth of heaven is the motion of every eyelash on every born and unborn human face. No kitties, no trees, no herds of wild animals are excluded or forgotten. The history of the growth of heaven is the image of all…

since I couldn’t say tomorrow I said Wednesday since I couldn’t say Cleveland I said Ohio  since I couldn’t say hello I hung up since I couldn’t say burger a waitress finished my sentence  a green-striped mint   dissolved  on my tongue  from peacock to dove since I couldn’t say my name   I opened  as if…

Someone else died again, and when I heard, I felt the green ocean like a suffocating quilt pulled over me. I had a father once with a heroin needle in his arm. So what am I capable of? I’d rather flip a book open than attend a party, feel my numbed fingertips in the cold…

“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal…Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Don’t sit too close, the smell of…