Article

  • To Be A Poet

    trans. Czech Ewald Osers Life taught me long ago that music and poetry are the most beautiful things on earth that life can give us. Except for love, of course. In an old textbook, published by the Imperial Printing House in the year of Vrchlicky's death, I looked up the section on poetics and poetic…

  • Anesthesia

    The Cleaveland Clinic advertises sun so light you could kick it with your tongue. You board a plane: note the exit, altitude changes, any difficulty in breathing. Morning slams into the the taillights of night. We will wait for you. Yours are: a moon hanging from a sleepless eye, a small AM radio pinned to…

  • For Mary

    My sister phones and asks if I'm getting anywhere. I say my house is full of ashes. I tried to burn the whole mess away. I realized I would die. I wept and put the flames out. It was a terrible mistake. So I took a ride. Long by yards by acres and acres of…

  • Transformer

    The train circled. You two hid in the algae trees, slinking around the plastic rocks, bellied down to the liver-colored land, getting close, getting closer until whose finger grazed the tracks? Who cares: you both reached the station sticky with blue, the transformer smoking and the train: crash! Daddy! But that wasn't you. You asked…

  • First Death

    She did not look maimed. Heavy, slow, too dumb to stand and run when she was knocked to the ground, she took a gut-buster from the ram she'd refused and groaned and groaned if I lay a hand on her and went on groaning as I stood, strange in this life I'd begun, and crowded…

  • Walking Home

    (Amagansette, L.I.) Each dawn this road beings with a rooster clearing the pride from his throat he couldn't swallow all night. When trees notice me they begin talking crow since I know nothing of flight, or how corn tugs you from cloud. They are still annoyed with a man who let them think Christ back…

  • Rilke’s Waif

    No place to lie down and say: home, I live here, work here, grow and reap here. No place to send myself. So in this cold night with a borrowed coat and a borrowed bike I sit looking out the window of a borrowed home and a borrowed wife. And this body. It gets later…

  • Destruction of Daughters

    The friend who is concerned with backdrops, not us, but what we stand against, his way of looking at the women he loves, to not look at them at all but at roofs, a bit of sky. To understand when exactly a woman is angry because of the way she works her mouth he believes…

  • Untitled

    I sit alone in the kitchen thinking about my lover who said it's over and listen to the guy in 12B end his binge with a song so full of wine it sounds red. I pour another cup of coffee, more mud than the last, then look out the window at the East River and…