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 …
Man is the cruelest animal. She wanted to sleep with the philosopher, she wanted to feel the warmth of his back against her chest. Some people had trouble with the consonants, others reversed the vowels. He made her think—that was his gift. She wanted to name a restaurant after him, the offerings cued to his…
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…
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…
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…
Whether the language rebellion against phallogocentrism is really the deepest thing or whether it’s just a way of getting out of history i.e., race, class, and gender, so tiresome, so unavoidable; whether, that is, poetry, etc., no matter how weird, surreal, anti-referential, disruptive, etc., accepts things as they are when they need to be changed?…
Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a…
Dimitri and I are half-naked when the woman shows up with the dogs. He is sitting up and I am astride him, my dress around my waist. What we had thought to be a secluded park looking out on an all-but-abandoned pond is actually someone’s backyard. “We’re clean-living people here,” the woman says. Then the…
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