Poetry

Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock,   take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised   snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one   can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards,   your toes point, turn out in stance, your…

We would like to grow herbs, cooking herbs and chamomile and lavender, and keep birds, farm fish, collect dogs and cats and horses. There isn’t enough room in the apartment. We need a plant to cover the litter boxes in the bathroom. There’s an unfinished birdcage you’ve built in the bedroom and now you’ve started…

for Grace There’s an oak leaf, one     caught in the latch on the door lodged like a letter in a letter box. It knocks slowly, eight-prongs     the wind tips it back, head leaning away     stem like a tail, wind knocking softly      turning over the life of a tough brown leaf. Stronger than a grasping hand,…

It must be just bad translating, like Robot Chicken and Fly Head; but thoughts of the three— Walnut tumors? Moo shu pus? Fire-bombed baby with broccoli?—make my hunger high- tail it like Iron Man in a thunderstorm. The Pair of Love Shrimp moan syphilitically. Seafood Commissioner takes bribes to okay rancid clams. The Sauteed Happy…

So you think you can bear me, now, do you? Carry my limp body through centuries Of sand (soft, made from ground shells, or souls As some have claimed), likewise, across that blue That is the paradise-never you deem We shall inhabit, in which I don cream And no clothes, or just a muslin dream-come-true…

I am like the trees not ruined exactly but shorn of ornament and destitute of motivation it is possible to find both beauty and truth in their pure forms and I would like to do so in myself if time could be persuaded to hold off its heartless green

Virginia, after a WPA photo Leafless tree shadow scribbles its face and shadows of deflated bushes flood the yard, an arrogant silver squalor so riddled and clumped it seems a crowd had barged about, then despaired of raising a response from such a blank and pointless house. Bare weatherboard of equivocal color, snaggle-toothed shutters. The…

When William Blake came fashionably late to parties he’d blame it on archangels, prophecies broadcast between the leaves of ordinary trees in the orchard: those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained… As in Martinsville, Wisconsin, when we allowed Mike Meinholz to get in the car, surely a mistake,…

In Surprise, every day is a party, streamers in the trees and piñatas bursting. No one from Surprise visits Dismal, though they’ve heard of its fog- shrouded hills and barren streams. In Dismal they dream of Happy and What Cheer, but it’s all they can do to someday make it to Boring, where homes are…