Poetry

  • in the blizzard

    the horses are filthy in their winter coatsgrubby and mattedmanes mended with haythey flicker between snows like medieval ordersof spiritual pilgrims; seenand invisible—unseen and realthe blizzard continues and the world is the windyour eyes close to slitsinside the drift and howlthe horses aren’t yours / not even broken to ridestill they help you get homeas…

  • (ode)

    When we looked at the circle, we felt powerless. Earth or fist our hands are bound together     in protest. Bare my throat, I said, in a faceful of sand. I swallowed too much water. The property     is private, the way we’ve come to think of grief as nonviolence, absence,     lack, fasting as an act of attention. After awhile…

  • After Grass and Long Knives

    Suspect enthusiasm— having eaten pins before— but that’s what keeps one quiet, that’s what makes one stay. Empty is just the first temporal name after something smaller sat there is gone. Then that space regains its height and wild. Let let lovers be light thoughts, just touch remembered in some not unkind way. It was…

  • energy

    Sometimes, after snow, you find yourself in a field of laughing gulls shaken and spat in a mass kill and your boots are the only noise. It’s like a bad joke I cannot resist telling. Enough. Hunger is plenty. Everything is dangerous. New moon, the red fox is out walking. Extinction is nothing to the…

  • Squalor

    In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…

  • At the Moment of Beginning

    1. A cage can be a body: heart in the nightquieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.Clock spring set. Hand in motion.The fact of the hollowed nothing head. How did we come to this? Inch by inch.I was born, borrowed from the beast;I was now property in a countrywhere chain reigns—the empire city of I. 2….

  • Days of Oakland

    Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…

  • Practice for Being Empty

    I’m only a human. Always is only in meas long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alonelooking for a fake mirror and finding itin some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that.While I am walking aroundon the only…