Before she told me, she let mefinish my dinner. I can still seethe pinkish cream sauceblossoming on the china. I didn’t know yet if I could walkwhen I pushed myself back from the table.This is what gets me:I didn’t throw the stained dish against the wall.I slipped the plastic from my wallet.I signed my name.No…
A poem about “Still Life with Fruit,Wine, Glasses, and a Bowl of Cherries,” by Hendrik van Streek, can’t stay in the painting for longunless it takes a closer look at the blue bowl holding the cherriesand wonders, as the wall label wonders,whether that’s Chinese porcelainshipped to Europe by the Dutch East India Company,or tin-glazed earthenwarefired…
He takes the bones of a pony, a pot of Earl Grey tea, a paintbrush and what remains of the bodywhere his students learned, for years, to name the parts, saying ulna, radius, tibia, skull. Saying femur, sternum, pelvis, clavicle. Is this not how god made Eve and Adam, more or less? The one from clay, the other from a rib…
The child imitating a dragonflyzoomed into the dusty elmsand came back a child. The child mocking a fireflylit and went outuntil he was invisible. In honor of nightthe child closed his eyes. The child pretending to be a childburned to grow old, soon he weptin dry coughs. Always the wind like a comb in your…
What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat. And all the threats implicit in that heat: the sweep and snare of blackberry, razor barb of concertina wire. The bluish teasel nearly chafed you with its bracts. You’ve made it through some muck with your absolute body still intact. So far, the Camp Far West lake…
My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They havebeen imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place.My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait. On mybirthday they say my name. They will never forget my name. Whatis that knowledge? Is it sadness? The days of…
for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give them…
The Day of Pentecost came without the usual ladder of tongues. The spike, driven through our white-bread boned shirts into our bare melon hearts, remained dry. The locusts, slung low in the trees, remained in our breath. The prophet, robed in wind, remained lost in the wilderness. The scarves about our heads. Something like a butterfly kissed the…
that spins too fast and then we get erased. The red and yellow leaves tickle at first, then burn all the way down our throats when they fall. Who will grease our arms for the ones we love? We release them to white bedsheets first, then to a blanket made of earth. They slip through…
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