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Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering some serious violations of the electrical code, the whole chaotic kelplike mess about to shower us with flames. I think I can render this clearly enough— Bert’s saxophone resting between his knees and propped against the wheelchair’s seat where his body keeps shape-shifting— he’s Buddha then Shop-Vac…

translated by Jennifer Grotz   When you appease my heart, I’ve nothing left to say, my agitated words fall fast asleep. I don’t even remember my petty dramas— your lullaby sings me awake. Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you the wound in my chest must stay fresh. And that the anguish…

When the poles clatter past, the years fall away, a spider drops from the petals of a flower, space is ever more empty the larger it grows, the steel wheels chunk-chunk-chunk on the joints of the rails, the friction making sparks, stars crushed and invisible to us inside. There is a distance that diminishes as…

Lebanon, Nebraska She stares through the window to the garden gate, guarded by Thunderbirds, one on each side, the road leading out to the highway. I’m waiting until I don’t love you, she answers. Puts her cup on its hook. Impossible to dry anything. Dishes, clothes. Your cheek where the cat licks it clean. So…

Sometimes we counted freight trains a hundred cars long, carrying searchlights, wings, and fuselages to Montreal. My grandfather and I found Luther’s leaky old rowboat, its oars shipped, across the railroad by Eagle Pond. We pushed it into dark water, carrying sticks for poles and the Bokar coffee can of worms I collected digging with…

Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge,                         breathless we stare out across sea-glare                         into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view.                                           The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…

for Roger C. Frank A fighter jet etches ink white as sperm on the stark sky while January troops deploy from Camp LeJeune, just like my first husband did in 1968 on his way to Viet Nam to wipe the Commie Gooks off the map. Before he could spell Khe Sahn, think massacre, he was…

The hotter the sun the whiter the bloom,             my grandmother used to say of the dogwoods,             Christ’s trees, still bearing his blood, and our hearts, of course,                                     in need of redemption. On her cue, I’d wield a bowl of potato peels             out past the barn to the hog pen             where…