Alice is pushing 40, her sprawling hips so sprawled that when she busts out of the White Rabbit’s House, Lewis Carrol has to play handyman, nailing the door and roof back on. Every time she tries to sneak away through the garden, the path flings her back, like a treadmill going too fast. She crushes…
And this time when she asks, The world will end, won’t it? a black river of crows will be rowing out above you, heavy oilcloth of wings working over slanted roofs, dark tents of sycamore. She will tilt her small head skyward. So that watching her, you could almost glimpse the secret greed of time…
When I was ten (no, younger than that), my mother tried to kill herself (without the facts there can’t be faith). One death or another every day, Tanqueray bottles halo the bed and she won’t wake up all weekend. In the myth book’s color illustration, the poet turns around inside the mouth of hell to…
from Seven Mediterraneans The dreamer had heard what she thought was a rumor about someone she didn’t know wanting to have sex with her. This after several months of trying to have sex with Janine, who was in the painting group-they all took turns posing for gesture drawings-right before the weather changed to rain along…
Dream of the bitter greenish flesh of a tiny orange tree we grew upstairs in our bow window: I am eight or nine. In life, I hoped the flesh would end up sweet the way the fist-sized oranges in grocery bags turn sweet, the way bought fruit does almost always. But in my dream I…
Poor Lorca, what a sissy, his whole life he knew this was coming and still he looks like an idiot, suddenly he stops defanging the piano in his underwear and gets all morbid, embarrassing the diplomats. He asks his parents for more money for a silver pant leg, wristwatches to fill a fishbowl, and then…
I picked these poems, and, except for a few instances, the editors of Ploughshares picked the prose. I picked these poems for the same reasons most readers linger on poems when they come upon them, reasons similar in spirit, no doubt, to those given by most writers invited to guest-edit these pages. I hope those…
Widening line of light What isn’t inked (“the area of its competence A visit to the morgue at night? (Averse?) Traversed By the frame A hand (reaching in? withdrawing (From outside To lift (this sheet) Sheer homesickness—the text * Awoke a serial homesickness (the text) for a place you lived in—off and…
So I went out into the nervous system of the air— Bearing beneath my lettrist overcoat my village The monumental city long ago breathed in And held Went out into the signal and static— Rivermutter steeplebell and traffic—net of noise Knotted by sirens Into the brutal red dream Of the collective—humming there behind…
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