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Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness but no one could be sure they had it, it’s impossible to talk about and comparisons are useless, like trying to judge butterflies by weight. You could be folding towels still warm from the dryer and suffering the Great Loneliness or suffering falling short of the Great Loneliness…

I woke in the middle of a wooded trailer park (in the middle of somebody’s lies), lying mired in a muddle about where I was, with nothing I could call my own: no shoes, no shirt, no pants, no socks, no job or occupation, income none. Wrecked mobile homes on either side hinted at ruin…

Pressed between print, haunting gutters, we traded closeness for dialogue and plot, dropped concordantly to sleep not long before dawn, hardbacks propped on our chests like tents on a plain in Cooper. Wingless, piscatorial, we dined on starches and molds, slid into cracks, crevices, bathtubs on occasion. Troubled to escape their slick, enameled palisades, we…

Even before I had arrived on the scene, Whitman knew I would stand just where he stood on the edge of the East River watching the tidal flux and the swoop of gulls, and maybe you have stood there, too, among the barrels and the taut wires. But I would rather know— assuming you and…

Somebody’s alone in his head, somebody’s a kid, somebody’s arm’s getting twisted—a sandwich flies apart, tomatoes torn, white bread flung, then smeared with shit and handed back to eat—I dog dare you, I double dog dare you… Somebody’s watching little shit friends watch little shit him climb to the crown of a broken-down cherry tree…

A Godly life would be the best, If it could be lived, so would Eden, If we had stayed there. Meanwhile we can choose a Godly life. For Eden is still burning, And the air scorches our lungs, Our tongues, our young, and yet, Another Eden remains a possibility. To live for others, To pray…

According to the wisdom brewing at the seminar table, a poem that begins with petunias should find a way to get away from petunias. It should deviate from its path, break the flower-chain of content transcending botanical considerations altogether. But sometimes a poem shows no interest in executing a sudden turn, swerving off in some…

If you’re a pig from Ohio, all muscle and gristle, not knowing they’re planning to rend you into bacon, what better place to find a wallow than this blue-black mud where you can keep yourself cool as you wait for David from Williamsfield, Ohio, Sergeant in the Army’s 4th Infantry— two thousand- six-hundred-fifty-seventh casualty whose…

White-haired, stolid madonna wrapped in shawls crocheted by hand, waits stately in the chair, hands folded, and seems to stare straight through the walls. Perhaps she looks because she finds things there, inside the bumps and grooves of textured paint: Poland, husband, country house, the air draping the mountain in the summer, faint with the…