Poetry

Here, take it, my mother would say, unwinding a scarf from her neck, slipping off a bracelet, a ring too small for my finger she tried to force anyway. A giver, a couldn’t-hold- on-to-it, my mother was. She would give you, as they say, the shirt off her back—and ours. My father’s three-piece suit and…

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…

First just a few, then more, then more— this one a gift, this one a pity adoption. They flutter as she passes. They call when she comes home. She strokes them, soothes them. They flap, agitated. She tries to nap, but their cries are constant. They are starving. They will not be placated. She says…

Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

His plane was scarcely more than canvas stretched across board. Gunned down by a German Fokker onto no-man’s land, my father crawled under cross-fire to a crater and sprawled in on the dead. Only once did he mention the maggots and stench in a world that slammed up too soon. That night, between the sizzle…

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…

And the craft that createth a semblance —Morris, “Sigurd the Volsung” (1876) I think about a tiger. Twilight exalts The vast and never-resting library And seems to make the shelves of books recede; Powerful, innocent, new-made, stained with blood, He will move through his rainforest and morning, Will leave his spoor upon the muddy bank…

The all volunteer unarmored drop-out meth-head accepting army, be all you can be dead here and slow or swifter in the sand, poor black white chicanas need jobs, who doesn’t like bread with their shrapnel in the morning, I feel a draft coming, a daft numbing of sense, can you dig it, your fox hole…