Poetry

Some mornings, his father floats at the foot of the stage and asks him to sing. He knows it is a ghost, a made airy thing. He knows nothing, no holler or raw shriek, keeps his father out of ether. Come, his shit-scared rage song goes, crawl into bed, weight this body down. But the…

The butterfly is solar-powered; it floats around the clearing, where the light is strong. When it comes to the perimeter of shade, it turns, and glides back into the clearing. It doesn’t use more energy than it requires, and we have never seen a butterfly that kept on growing bigger and bigger, from the size…

  Gustave Caillebotte, c. 1872 Say “canal” and there’s that final vowel Towing silence with it, slowing time To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still. The stunted concrete mocks the classical. Water says, “My place here is in dream, In quiet good standing. Like a…

An old man walked out onto the pond, not thinking, while the thick ice chirped under his feet like sonar. Clouds in the west kept scattering, so that a few stars shone before daybreak. Paler clouds in the east frayed at the blue edge of the planet’s shadow. The warmest groundwater seeping into the marsh…

The third one of the year it rose all over so close it smelled the fried oil of our dinners— its very nearness altered what we knew as it called to us in waves of no-sound, thinking its no-think, about circles. After it rose from super into moon, two smaller moons signaled from each car,…

I am a vanilla cupcakeand I’ve come to tell you exactly how I feel.When a vanilla cupcake speaksyou ought to show respect for its appeal,and wonder what this cupcake will reveal.Anxious and puzzled, basically, is how I feel. Anxious about getting sick and getting old,and then dying. Also quite anxiousabout satisfying some desires before I…

In the dream he was a hawk with blood on its beak.In the dream he was a hawk. In the dream he was a woman, naked, indolent from pleasure, a gleam     of sperm on her vaginal lips.In the dream he was a woman. (He could both be the woman and see the viscid fluid in the…

By the window in the fancy hotel— looking out, looking out with them. A little coffee. A little cake. These things have come for me. And not a secret, but apparent from which I come out of how I could stand back, and let happen the birds, and the sea, and the sky. I woke…

Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housedhousehold added to another, all abandoned and madeto abandon their names. A non-colonnadeof gray clods. A un-quadrangleof neo-rational obliteration. An arcadeof ashes. Ditch-buriedhordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisonednecropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settledprecincts of our planet—or maybe at the edge of the salted fieldof…