Poetry

Is poetry ruining my life, I wonder,upstairs in a house with more windows than wallswhere I am trying to write or read it.Downstairs “Lady in the Dark,” complete with dialogue,too loud, and the purr of my husband’s snore.I feel a fume coming on, kindlingfor an inferior rage that will not serve,but ruins.At dawn, before speech…

All one needs to belong to the company Of the truly grateful is to feel grateful, Just as I felt when, retrieving a sock This afternoon from behind the dryer, I found the book you lent me Four years ago, two years before your heirs Sold off your library. Did you ever wonder What had…

Today I bow to the power of negative space,the beauty of what’s missing—the hard work of yard work made harder without you,while the stiff kiss of acorns puckers the ground. I am a fool. Even as the red impatiens wither and brown,they are still lovely. I feed the gaping mouths of lawn bags with their…

“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school.But what about a school that offers coursesIn loitering as an art, each class designedTo break another link in the argumentThat we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall,Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on timeFor the meeting of those in need of a truthWe’ve distilled…

You are a wretch and a leech and a dirtyold man and have been trying to pushinside me for years. Well, come on then.There’s something about the plum warm air. Usually at this time of day I don’twant to see people. Usually when I’m onthe old swings I think about the manwho stopped his car…

It was a straw light, a blond light, a water light in the window when I looked outside and saw it was still daylight, flooding the hot, white room of her death that had been the hot, white room of her maternal loneliness. The heel of my hand hard on her sternum as her heart,…

for my mother, Veronica Cazier (1955-1991) The undertaker gripped my hand. I said I wanted Dairy Queen. I touched her cheek because I needed proof—and after, Dairy Queen. It’s what I asked for every day: to go to Dairy Queen. Worse than dead, she wasn’t quite herself. I pictured Dairy Queen. I’d finished second grade…

When I woke, makeup-smeared and sallow, everyone was gone. Greasepaint smoothin the new line of my cheek and corset-bruises on my hips, first warm day of the year. A falseeyelash settled like a moth on my collarbone. They loved me on the high wire last night in my spangled tights all done up as the…

That glass of wine suspended in airdecades ago—3D projection still a tactilememory, the ruby liquid shimmeringas if just poured into its goblet,the hands reaching out,all of us incredulous then believingbefore this chalice raised to science and art. And now in Japan, rising pop divacat girl Hatsune Miku—high-def,green-haired avatar—“sings”synthesized pop in huge stadiums,bloodless and breathlessfor thousands…