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  • Tenth Commandment

    The woman said yes she would go to Australia with him Unless he heard wrong and she said Argentina Where they could learn the tango and pursue the widows Of Nazi war criminals unrepentant to the end. But no, she said Australia. She’d been born in New Zealand. The difference between the two places was…

  • Still Life with Motion

    after Giorgio de Chirico 1. When I became metaphysical, the artist begged my forgiveness. A small sacrifice 2. to rid the palette of its noise. I have traveled far on the unlikely properties of still life, 3. and in my bleakest postures, I have glided on the prows of rowboats without dreaming; 4. so I…

  • The Hole in the Ocean

    Hovering in the air were two luminous shapes. They turned, balanced in a pose of surrender. Water poured out into the lower world, through channels unsolved by busy rats, tides, and fish. Then a phrase of music is misheard, and the green Orpheus descends, striking the prison bars of the sky like a lyre as…

  • Eleventh Hour

    The bloom was off the economic recovery. “I just want to know one thing,” she said. What was that one thing? He’ll never know, Because at just that moment he heard the sound Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there, It was dark. His hand went to the wall But the…

  • 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…