he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…
I erased it from the blackboard. Chalk bits dust to floor. The alphabet trailed me out of school. I wrote it again, in bold. By afternoon, I’d ripped out the page and fed it to the ducks. Bits of paper from bills into the pool. I walked to where the dam collects the shore and…
Months after it has all come out, Annie will go on thinking about Baby R and Mondo and how it could just as easily have been her. And yet, somehow Annie had always been able to slip away, hardly aware that she was doing so. Today, she was walking into the locker room,…
So big deal, so you find it sort of sucks, the voice said. Fine. Go out to your regular life where they pay you for doing something. The poem’s okay in that pile of old papers. You’ll see how you’ll empty the day, be back and open the door. Keys, even useless ones, have a…
—ágnes nemes nagy every few minutes, through a metal flue the throat bursts into flames from the furnace above my bed. it’s the color of fire. i can see the chokeholds catch. fire ants carry off the heat down the metal ducts, and the vents push out the heat, which falls down the walls behind…
If it isn’t a disappointment it’s an overwhelming number of coincidences. Because really I don’t need another you another pigeon like you, I will tell them. You are at the same time an embraceable construction and of Kansan descent. Nouns and nouns and metal and nouns and you might suffer the weather but…
The boys’ stories of the tobacco— splotched and yellow “toad” squirting blood from eyes and licking red ants don’t prepare you for a patch of the field rising and rushing blurry, then stopping, fitting earth tightly, the last puzzle piece. Nor do you know how you’re guided to it, and though they’ve told you…
Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…
For many, gifted writer and giving teacher Jean Valentine has always resided under the radar. Poet/meisterblogger Ron Silliman writes in 2007: "In over a quarter century of visiting New York, where she’s made her home, for readings, talks, conferences, I’ve never—not once—heard a New York poet ever mention her name. For her sense of ‘presence’…
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