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  • House With Children

    First the white cat named after Indians Slipped in—too fat by half, White marked with five black spots like sudden stones In the snow—poked in through his hidden door. Set flowing through the house a draft, A chill tangled in the winter of his fur. Alerted to those skulks, those leaps, those claws, The sparkless,…

  • Frankly, I Don’t Care

    This miserable scene demands a groan. —John Gay Frankly, I don't care if the billionaire is getting divorced and thus boosting the career of his girlfriend, a “model/spokesperson” with no job and nothing to promote; nor does my concern over celebrity X undergoing surgical procedures leaked as “primarily cosmetic,” if it can be measured quantitatively,…

  • Hoop Dance

    And sometimes they are birthcries,      ancient audience, succulent moon and Milky Way,      and sometimes they are prayers, jubilant paths, perilous constellations,      this spirited, whirling jewelry I must wear,      these bride-shy or ruffian hoops, this work-that-must-be-done      in beauty, in beauty— Look, my dance is a willingness away      from poverty's arrows, all the known hells,      a brisk…

  • ‘Petrarchan’

    It is always among sleepers we walk. We walk in their dreams. None of us Knows what he is as he walks In the dream of another. Tell me my name. Your tongue is blurred, honeyed with error. Your sleep's truth murmurs its secret. Tell me your name. Out at the edge, Out in the…

  • A Letter to a Friend

    “. . . and another workshop, since my last letter, at the mental hospital. No, they don't pay me. Several good writers, but it's sad (the locks). A man said he'd killed his cousin. A young girl, Sarah, tremulous, with electric hair, said, ‘I was thinking about good and evil, in the cafeteria. All I…

  • Ode to the Noodle

    Little chameleon swooning for a tin pot of old water, you remind me of our worst lieutenant generals, balancing on tiptoes, yanked tall and then swollen with greed, curling their thick tongues like hoodwinked nooses down into the blue bowl— the color of tricky sky, of well-traveled ocean glass, the last emptied bottle tossed overboard—…

  • Boston

    My father found himself in Boston once, ten thousand myths away from Oklahoma. I think of him standing on the rim of the Atlantic, the horizon vertical as it describes the Upperworld and the Underworld. It was the water that attracted him, as if he were some kin to the Watermonster, as if he’d heard…

  • C.O.

    For my son I tried to distinguish      between personal fear and principle. Now laughter phlegms deep in my throat because I remember the tenuous mud dam      in the marsh, only surface tension holding back the black water, and the sleek beaver      gliding with a mouthful of sedge and sapling back to the lodge and her…