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  • Up Jumped Spring

    for Nana What’s most fantastical almost always goes unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring. Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee your night, creameries your dream factories. Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth can still be the same…

  • Hail to the Artist

    translated by Marilyn Hacker In the country, he talks to her about art About love, about life, he says that he creates And he loves, she says that his painting Is rubbish, he says that art is life, She says that he’s a layabout, He plays at pricking her with a blade of grass, she…

  • Every Tongue Shall Confess

    As Pastor Everett made the announcements that began the service, Clareese Mitchell stood with her choir members, knowing that once again she had to Persevere, put on the Strong Armor of God, the Breastplate of Righteousness, but she was having her monthly womanly troubles, and all she wanted to do was curse the Brothers’ Church…

  • The Star

    You’re writing down next spring’s     garden: beans, tomatoes, squash & so on. Outside, snow sticks everywhere,     clogging everything up, hemming You in. When done you pick up     the newspaper. In the obits there’s always someone you know.     They come & go, & you never Quite get used to it. Walking    …

  • Water Thieves

    She had passed a Wilderness, an Apache, an Escaper, a Montana, and, tragically, a Swinger. Now it was a Yellowstone Capri, the geezer in the wheelhouse plying the highway, scanning for snags. You can be Yellowstone, or you can be Capri, Helen thought. But you can’t, big buddy, be both. She dusted it. The motor…

  • In Hot Pursuit

    across the Passaic’s asphalt drawbridge into the heart of Kearny— my cheeks flushed with wine—you the muse I did not choose dragging danger down in chains across the hangdog face of me as I followed you upriver, wanting you to cleanse me like a sari fitted through a virgin’s wedding band—why else would I cruise…

  • Passover

    Chicago, April 18, 1994 Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest-a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the…