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What’s hard, sandy, and won’t crush like sweet olives against my lips? I lie on barbed wire but dream of caves plushed with skin. My mind’s lined with vaseline, my body cups like a breast against the sheet. Think of angels. Their marble knees streaked with veins, their thighs locked against the touch that spreads…

Your eyes float like sun grains through their light, pollinating the air — with idiots?      If they graze and go, the same wind that brought them, blows them away, the same hand. Returning, they will appear as an orange in the sky, the segments as windows, the focus sharper, more acute. In them, I have…

Frontiers are explored in a mirror; sharks contained in their appetite. The skin occludes all but the pen, harvesting love from any field. The clock is a compass leading to the corridors of sleep. The borders that will be crossed occur as we sit alone in our rooms. An island is waiting with the promise…

The squirrels are frantic in the branches; birds circle; the cat waits near the roots, wanting to strip the bark and grease the trunk. Here’s the news under the ground: the rain’s driving weeds through concrete; farmers are tying razors to worms to fish sprouts out of seeds. You’re eager too. Don’t your fists twitch…

Everywhere gutter musicians with rare saxophones rise in the air like snowy egrets. The night wolf drifts on a coffin nailed with stars. A man in an alley unravels the feathers of a woman’s body. From the firmament above the rooftops a hand rockets loose, catching fire in the snow. The one window, steam-laced with…

My first substituted coughing for breathing. It had no nose no eyes just a smooth feverish body: incurable tenderness. My second did have a nose brown eyes and soft full gums. She looked like my uncle the one I’d only seen pictures of — the one I knew I’d have loved the best. This baby…

I’m tired in my hands from tearing at walls and my feet are bored with kicking, but the head stays open and empty. Some dream crowbars and files, steel fists and paper parapets, the night watch blind in the searchlights, but if the doors opened they’d root in the stone like ivy; they’d lock themselves…

I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…