Poetry

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…

Read it on the Greyhound back before I saw Bogart in Marlowe’sclothes,                before the old man bought the Buick,                before he changed to dust,                before my mother scattered him along the highway to Lake               Mead beside a scrubby desert tree.                Before I didn’t buy the whiskey,                before I didn’t hoist a glass,                before I didn’t tell…

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 …

in terms ofdesign onebox is coloredorange the one you wantedalways is andsits in the bathroomof anyone’shouse causethat’s whatshe wantsit’s choosingthat wakes thingsup I wondered howlong allthat I needed and encounteredherewould come like a wavenot the shakebut the aftereffectsand this boxdid saythere was a wayto see thisthinga-loneJuly calledit calculuswhat iscomes in boxeswhat is notcomes in wavesthe…