Poetry

Mars Being Red

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush of youth, while our steps released the squeaks of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson of fresh…

Future Farmers

The best boys were called: to buck hay till age seventy-five, to castrate a steer & rescue a breach-birth calf     under a dusty light bulb, father eight or ten daughters & whip sense into their heads (their character would be their dowry), & one smoking bull of a son,     inhale a cyclone    …

Dream: Natural Law

The sea is clean, unscuffed: it looks convincing, the sun like     hearsay slipping into it. Donde están sus padres? a small girl asks me, pink plastic shovel     in her fist, the paint of her dress still wet in places. I have no answer, I’m glitter, I’m hardly here. She’s glad and kneels as…

A Violence of Season

Cold drops like a hawk on Blue Hill, Maine. It bores into the skin, the heart, claws the eye. She craves and fears the imprint of weather: piles of leaves waiting for a ceremony of scented smoke, the shrinking day, the sun’s oblique afterthought, cool on rooftops. The stubbled field. A lace of frost. She…

Orpheus Again

And so he descended into memory, which might as well have been the afterlife, because he hoped that she was there, waiting for him to take her back from wherever the past had abandoned her to, and lo! she was there in all the glow and splendor only memory affords, and such impossible perfection, how…

Viva Vox

Every time I looked out the window, there was a different kind of light. I remember other things, of course but it is the only thing I felt in that blinding way. In the pain, I said, What is the happiness? I’ve never been so pure, I said . . . felt it to open…

Jailbound

“Quickly or slowly I will go.” —Jean Genet, 1954 My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet’s Thief’s Journal. Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me. I want to say, He was a…