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  • Some Comfort

    Two straight days of sun and the idiot magnolia opens Boston, to cleanse it, pull the bullet of winter. I feel better. The bodies in the river thaw to neon fish, and clouds, sculling. There’s no telling when it will snow again. Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets: landed absences, long-distance calls for relief….

  • Silent Letters

    A. There was a man, Agur, toward the end of Proverbs. He wasn't a very important man. Maybe he was a failed prophet, these things happen. He wasn't very bright – a mesomorph, chunky and tough, not cut out to be a prophet at all, not good with signs, a stumbler, no king. As though…

  • My Malaria

    Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…

  • Involving a Risk

    Nights flex. You occur to me like morning’s sketchy moon: a surprising intimate. I lapse into you delirious as a drive into rain. Something you say is your hand, opening, inside me. You have to sleep alone to dream. . . Who can remember, counting backwards, the logic of snow. Leaves shake their fists, the…

  • Oreana

    on Lake Titicaca Era of Giant Tapirs she stepped out of her craft Oreana her skin the deep sheen of gold with weird webbed feet & hands embraced the Boss Tapir *     *      * thus we began who have two breasts like her & intelligence & a womb like hers & a tool like the tapir’s…

  • The Corrected Works

    (for Lynne) 1. My fingers will not function when your eyes are closed. They stop at the letters of your shrugging shoulders; your clothes whisper: “There are words better left alone.” At odd hours I rob you blind and hurry home carrying the ill-gotten loot as if it were the history of future civilizations. I…

  • Voice From Danang

    After we had burned on the water a while, amid the chopper-borne shouts, flares, and thrashing rope ladders, we put into quiet, dark rooms. I couldn’t touch you through my walls – my nails screeled into chines. Why had they bored lights in me like that? You must have known we were set on sand….