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  • Recycled

    “This Book of Poems Has Been Printed on Recycled Paper” Isn’t it a form of reincarnation— the sports page or an ad for vitamins becoming, miraculously, the space where a love poem finds itself? a discarded shopping list (cereal, oranges, soap) returning to life as the backdrop for a sonnet or villanelle? I stare at…

  • The Projected Man

    I wander down rows of plastic magic—glowing       The boy comes home to a house too full of skulls and x-ray specs squeezed in next to sneeze dust       decoupage and dead dreams, his mother nearly adrift in genie bottles, fake ice where flies swim frozen,       on the dhurrie beige couch, worn down with being arrested, ruled…

  • A Draft of Light

    We all had to wear hats against the unvarying sun,       Of course; but what was more significant, We’d had to bring with us—along with our freshly prepared       Thoughts, wrapped up in the old way—bottled light To quench any thirst for knowledge that walking through the dry       Valley of grayish terebinths and still Lizards on chunks…

  • Summer, Florida Keys

    Count on the storm to steel the waves, tin their shimmer and heave. The electric cracks sheen the air, particle its vapors, and the wind that’s coming has already moved the sea, miles off. Shoreside, we sense the sea has breathed in and readies. Now, oiled by the hovering cobalt, it simply rolls within itself…

  • Anywhere Elsewhere

    How anyone is happy in this country I don’t know. Any way you turn there is an edge, and everyone cocks a wind-burned hand over the brow to look out under it. The water flings petticoats of foam against wolf-headed rocks, and multicolored boats moored among others to the weathered pier bob dumb as soldiers….

  • Back Then

    1. My sea-blue father Left me Heart-burst Broke as a dune does Not glass, no cracks A surge of softness Slid down my throat To stifle, for good, Unendingness. 2. My own me was haunted by a shovel That chased me through the trees. It called Hurry home to Mummy And her theater of the…

  • Winter Park

    What matters is how you disagree with me, not the smooth surfaces of your appeasements. Let snow melt off the statues, parks come and go like seasons. See the park in snow see my hands rough from snow fingers red and stiff and remember the past when they begin to thaw filling with pain they…