Poetry

  • The Projected Man

    I wander down rows of plastic magic—glowing       The boy comes home to a house too full of skulls and x-ray specs squeezed in next to sneeze dust       decoupage and dead dreams, his mother nearly adrift in genie bottles, fake ice where flies swim frozen,       on the dhurrie beige couch, worn down with being arrested, ruled…

  • Back Then

    1. My sea-blue father Left me Heart-burst Broke as a dune does Not glass, no cracks A surge of softness Slid down my throat To stifle, for good, Unendingness. 2. My own me was haunted by a shovel That chased me through the trees. It called Hurry home to Mummy And her theater of the…

  • The Battle of Anghiari

    Boarding the local at Midtown, all seats taken, he worked his way through the car with firm lean arm from his black T-shirt pulling him down the high stainless-steel handrail. Through that forest of bodies flashed his teeth: in spasms his lips would pull back and his eyes rage, then calm. Neat, perhaps thirty, the…

  • Anywhere Elsewhere

    How anyone is happy in this country I don’t know. Any way you turn there is an edge, and everyone cocks a wind-burned hand over the brow to look out under it. The water flings petticoats of foam against wolf-headed rocks, and multicolored boats moored among others to the weathered pier bob dumb as soldiers….

  • Brownfield Sonnets

    1. Hay What’s the Latin word for hayfield? Virgil’s mum in his instructive Georgics, though my neighbors talk of nothing but: how weeks of cool rain forced the upright grass— seed ready to burst from fuzzy heads too wet to cut, releasing to the wind goodness that should be stuffed above a stall, or pulled…

  • Extremadura

    I’m tired, spent, really, but don’t say much, lean toward the rookeries, spirulina days, effect trooperish refrains, undelinquent and pressed, not hardy but persistent still, in a fading way, feel dunked, put upon, dry-hearted often in face of grief, bear trouble poorly, issue bulletins to the Dept of the Interior requesting stays and clarifications, sent…

  • Anonymity

    These strollers here under the arcades, these anonymous passersby, how would you greet them if met at parties except in banter? “Are you vegetarian? Virgo? Rhesus? An alto? Mesomorphic? Melancholic? Here’s someone sanguine. Phlegmatic? Rheumatic? Optimist? You must be my- opic. Blotto? Sit down. A zero? Now, now.” But no, they walk past each other,…