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Following Her to Sleep

My friend wears boots to sleep so that I might learn her path. I know the way now. The room is as silent as a child in a closet. I hang this notion from an instrument of hindsight where it rocks at the appropriate moment like fortune's cube on a string. My neighbor with no…

Sea Migration

We have traveled a long way riding the chilly island ferry. If a piano were playing it would not be the music of Handel. The gull floating behind the ship is a perfect syllable dying to be born, a piece of ash freed from the ship's stack. We raise our arms with saltines until he…

Technology

The sink's dishes are the sink's problem as I ooh and aah at the complexity of balance implicit to keep the structure: eight glasses, thirteen bowls, a valley of forks, intact, while I run hot water over a knife for my onion. There's a science to the bathtub's archipelago of grunge colonies that's necessary to…

The Wish

In fourth grade Gabe Acosta and Jamie Hunter promised me they would bring a noose to school and hang me from a specific bough in the recess field. They told me I was a fairy and that fairies belonged in heaven. They each then tweaked my ear lobes, and I could only smile at them…

An Eclogue

I had to crawl to get in Between the stove and the wall, But once there I fit easily. In that corner, the stove was All there was: its tiles warm And plain; a quiet plume Of dust. While all the rest, Even the man in the hat Hand in hand with his wife On…

For Joseph Cornell

Not to arrive and not to ever know how to arrive or how to live even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens. This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes and for time that moves like a silent film through a projector and for the eyelids of the blind and for those…