Poetry

Well, there’s the lack of vacuuming, carrot juice spills on the ivory couch, dust running along the floorboards like a pet, veiling the TV, sills, the furnishings of books, shoes without glue, the lack of comfortable seating or dining, the canopy I gave away, childhood desk sold, gold chair left in a spidery garage, rose…

A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the     cabin door. A tube top and…

In the morning my neighbor walks onto his deck and looks out, some days in a yellow jacket, some days in a raincoat, some days in a shirt. The house is far enough off I do not know his name, cannot quite see his face. I would not know him in line at the grocery….

The dark and heavy coat she always wore hid From her as much as anyone What grew her belly out one thought at a time. And she who did not know her body, Who was surprised to feel it Created with some boy she’d barely met, Ignored the word so much a shock She was…

don’t leave the tent delirious and starving in the blizzard makes more sense in hindsight through the howls of distant seals the ruined captain wanders off arctic exploration is no fun makes more sense in hindsight also don’t sleep with her or don’t take the red ones or don’t let the bees escape I took…

Dipped in the batter of the personal, adrift in its thick glisten, she gave up ambition and dyed her hair blond-on-black for her post-post-feminist project. Personal experiences are chains, balls, iron filings drawn fatally to the magnetic personality. Once she bore the leashes and tourniquets of the personal; stuffed herself deep into the nooses of…

Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder. Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea. This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells and the ocean, I’ll count my encounters with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, with the factory of liquid fold and…

He was the first person I knew who spoke to God and to whom God replied. And he was the first person I knew who had written the great works of whomever you might name— mine own T. S. Eliot—though he affected no accent and wore a shrunken Grateful Dead T-shirt. It was not only…

Benny’s handsome, red brown like rust on a hoe. Empty headed cows loll in the pasture ignoring the mule’s bray. Light shines as easily through a cicada’s husk clinging to a tree as through a bottle of liniment or a glass of tea on the dinner table. The hems of his overalls fray and tickle…