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  • Voice as Gym-Body

    In order for a rapprochement with the physical body Only necromancy could be behind it. Racked on a stretcher the I.V. tubes string me up like a cello without a player   Only necromancy could be behind it. These days of horse-drawn betrayal. Like a cello without a player I’m caught, a crown of thorns,…

  • An Elegy Is a Man

    I have been sculpting my father’s head. I began it when he died, when his head was most familiar, when the priest called him a liar. I have been sculpting my father’s eye. It had been wide and black, they say, peerless in the art of sinking; my father was a king. I have been…

  • Color Comes to Night

    In the line of trees part of the mirror grows a harder forest through them. A pallor is the storm. Blossoms through the trees, the mirror of rain, flow hard as a fever. We hear the marble water dressing, dressing. The middle of rain sours the skin. The mist is combed through, pulled apart, having…

  • Twelfth Night

    His first infidelity was a mistake, but not as big As her false pregnancy. Later, the boy found out He was born three months earlier than the date On his birth certificate, which had turned into A marriage license in his hands. Had he been trapped In a net, like a moth mistaken for a…

  • Cave in the Ravine

    A monster has risen out of somewhere— its left foot clawed, gripping the earth; the most terrible things coming out of its giant mouth— fire, and at the same time poisonous black spears— for the monster is not of nature entirely.               In front of the monster is a figure in black that seems to…

  • Fish Dying on the Third Floor at Barney’s

    The clothes are black and unstructured this fall,                           enlivened               here and there by what appears to be monastic chic: a crucifix of vaguely Eastern pro-                           venance,               a cowl. My friend, fresh out of drama school, explains to me how starkly medieval woolens                           were cut:               few seams, to spare unraveling,…

  • After Rosa Parks

    Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall. “What’s the deal, Kid Cody?” When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if…