Poetry

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…

On the morning she became a young widow,my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,looked up from her work to see a hawk turnher prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.That same moment, halfway around the worldin a Minnesota mine, her husband died,buried under a ton of rockfall.She told me this story sixty years ago.I don’t…

I’ve watched this ultrasound so oftenI close my eyes and picture a daughter feathered with pixels,a putto’s skeleton. So here is a piece of art I own, a representationany impressionist would be proud of for it moves, though it doesn’t yetmove me. But I do return, so she has achieved what a painting wants:to be…

from the balcony of footpaths speak of the black horse & the dead rider how old the mirror is which brings with it spirits like tracks filled with basil from where you stand sing an antique song let your arms veinless hang by your side wait for the gypsy who took your life away you…

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s evermet, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.) I said     I’m dead you put blanketson my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’realways cold    Dead I said again   you saidThat won’t stop youfrom stealing…

What a name to call your sister—Nada:Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish,where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds                of the way to Nathalie where, in French,               the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth,               the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the wordcontagious, even Mom fizzing laughteras she said, “Don’t call your…

as the voice inside the telephonemade crying soundsor allergy sounds. It was that time of year—             the particle count highand already a shortageof rental cars and we were all desperateto vacate the premiseswhile you had already done so.                          Standing between the voiceand my selfat the center of ourweather     hovering acrossthe outlandish girthof America and twenty years…

If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head  away,  if  death  is  turning  away, with long  brown  human  hair,  revolving  like  a globe,  from …