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Daughter

I hear her splintering like the seed inside the pine cone, the furious grease inside the smoke and speed of the fire of our bodies. The hard red seed of her, her pink nipple, her penis-husk, her odors and hairs, her molecular dust, her dream file, her first and last word, her undiscussed déjà vu's,…

Crazy Glue

When I walk home with groceries, the child shifts back against my belly, moving with the eggs in their twelve jiggling sockets. I try to have a sense of beauty. This is my true voice I want moving among others                 and yet it has a rhythm of its own, the possible, the cries of…

Pilgrimage

Today I returned To see those two worn-out and rumpled Representatives of the common world (Were they mother and son, Or did they merely resemble each other?) Kneeling in adoration Before the elongated Mannerist Apparition of the Virgin Bearing a chubby five-year-old Son of God Out of her sacred house And into the world As…

Philomela

. . .by the barbarous king So rudely forced —Eliot, “The Waste Land” Aunt Phil was no fin de siècle brooched-up elegant with one eye always on the karat though she was almost married to several goose- bottomed men. I begin where the last had the balls to jilt her. She'd even put down a…

Rubber Rats

You know what it's like Sundays to wash, brush your teeth, pull on pants and sneakers then amble to the grocery a few blocks away for juice, milk, bagels, then carry them back, make coffee, toast—you know it. But the box of rats sitting on the counter as I left seemed all wrong, cruel, what's…

Gifts

It turns out that I was supposed to eat the blue Hubbard squash I got for Christmas, lung-shaped refugee from the winter closing of the farm market, relic of a profligate ambition. My friend tied a red ribbon around its stem, and I thought it was dying, so I mourned it. I found a place…

Rue Replique

The light wouldn't go away and he kept on walking In the sort of French a baby speaks Sometimes he forced himself to be spoken to sometimes not A woman dressed as a pre-teen may have asked a question They shuffled on the ocean floor in gentle parallel streams      opposed But not mixing cool salt…