Poetry

The graveside prayers and eulogies over,A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstonesAs we trooped back over a hill watchingThe wind lift the widow’s skirt higher and higher,While the undertaker ran after us,Waving an umbrella someone had left behind. We couldn’t help but think of our friendLying red-faced in his pricey new…

Out in the open, there is a cowshed.There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet—You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your ownideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a vest out of…

      I am sitting next to you & you are not there,you’re a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air.       to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takesto be human & I want it & I think you want me       to have it all, but I knowwhat it’s like to be one of the…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

Like grass in rain,my dead grow at an amazing rate. Meet me,won’t you, I’ve managed to lose the key. Death, you’ve outdoneyourself. The lawn a little lake.