Poetry

Like a voice drifting across low damp ground     it is always there. I have whole files on the subject. There is nothing more to know.     My name hangs like a sign outside an old inn, a painted figure for illiterates, blown to and fro.     Last night I had a dream of finally…

I’ve come home, to sit inside this house among the locusts and the crickets, their goodbye duet, their chitter and squeak of So long. Packing his things to make room for my own: his pale blue Easter suit, his Bowie knife, its leather sheath branded with Nashville. Catholic medals, a finger’s length statue of Christ…

for lunch he made her sweet peas with milk and butter her favorite­— and after school he taught her lessons in French kissing until the grandmother caught her snuggled in his lap fingering combat ribbons and stripes the smell of aftershave and tobacco safe and after all what did she know when she was pulled…

In tennis shoes whitened with toothpaste Running next to a hoop steered with a stick From the hill down the footpaths of Aptekarka park I’d like to see myself today Through your boy’s eyes. Our shared shame Under the duckweed of still ponds. Above them, in that past now, the rusty sun. Which of us…

Sing for us whose troubles are troubles we’re lucky to have: cold orange juice, and cold coffee, corridor after corridor, as our circadian rhythms fall into place: work is a refuge from home, and home from work. We have task force reports, but no tasks, and no force, so far removed from concrete and crisp…

At dark, I make a homesick says a Japanese exchange student in my wife’s ESL class, writing how much he misses his family, his girlfriend, a certain café in Kyoto. I suggest tutoring. But that night, it feels strangely fitting after our second bottle of wine to cap the red pen bleeding cursive from her…

Think of a lizard as a spot of day-glo green, insect-sized, though in all ways perfect. Lost in this kitchen of chrome-souled recipes for oblivion, he looks hard at me. His skin, my skin, our heartbeats tight with trauma, I carry him out where, tack-sharp, two green push-ups, and a cool survey of the universe,…

Nicole has this one friend whose hand can burn straight through her clothes & through the skin of her back. Like this, she said, placing her hand on my winter coat, the train above the East River, stalled. Like this, the canary blossoms of Chinese witch hazel flame into this world as astronomers believe dark…

Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…