Poetry

  • Please and Thank You

    Say no now and you will get off easy. Maybe.The firebrand in your heart is only a rental,Just a spent ember with nothing left to doThan plead guilty, not no contest. Now go,Go to your room and gawk, or else text-messageYourself, write runes, or if the rhinencephalonIn your boiling brain dictates, write filth,Stinky warm-ups for…

  • The Sacred Harp Book

    If I get religious for a minute, it will be to keep termswith the bewildered caul of being thirteen, surrounded by the dead. What used topeek through the roof, never so much stroking string things and eating afterlifebiscuits, as making sound like a wonky piano dragging its broken leg in an interminable circleof Sundays. I…

  • Song of Myself

    after Issa I think it’s enough just to sit and meditate, heedlessof the needs of others close to us and oftheir perpetual demands that seem to sap thestrength from us. My doorway and the morning deware all I need to make my day, and thatis where I’ll plan to be. And if that marksme misanthropic,…

  • To the Language Spoken in the Country of Urgency

    In the country of urgency, there is a language.                                                                                   —Grace Schulman I must have said somethingto the man in my confusion when I put my hand on his shoulder long enough for a cement truck to breeze by—it would have killed him— instantly, I think, when the light changes and its change falls through our long…

  • A Dream for an Opera

    The last tug at the sleeve lets her blouse falloff shoulders to breasts that have never seena lover, she shudders, shakes so hard I touch the bones inside the song of this afternoonto stop the loud way our fear of us rattles herin the flutter of bugs so fragile they can tear in the wind….

  • Free Checking!

    Desire for the good deal, the hot needto look slick, wordless advertisementfor the invisible product, I release youlike the dumpster behind the cafeteria releases these long, festering rivers of milk.Fear of death, fear of narrow spaces, loveof the wine-red mole that punctuatesthe transaction-inspiring cleavage of Jill, my credit union teller, I release you likethe scared-shitless…

  • Pity

    The cookies his neighbors brought by             didn’t taste like pity— at my father’s house              for the first time, after, the locks broken into, now new, when cross             the street comes a neighbor, cookies shrouded             in tinfoil, a plate I need not return.             How long had the pair kept vigil out the window             for someone to set foot here so they…

  • Chicken Brick’n

    Because there’s no end to cruelty,                    Lyle ties half a brick                                        to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower                    where waits Tony—together,                                        they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken                    that charts its course                                        across clear air, fans its wings and flaps a few feet                    with all the glory of a crippled                                        helicopter, thereby…