Poetry

  • ὁδός [hodos]

    Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…

  • Lines on Sublation

    Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…

  • Sing to Me

    Chipped ivory, wire into the wall, a hole for headphones— This piano came from that one, the first piano, a dark wooden body we sheltered in, a father broad as an ark. I could float alone in it, go back and forth, E-flat, E, and slip between tipped sky and dirty penny taste in the…

  • Gut-Bomb

    What separates four pounds of ground chuck elk from four pounds of ground chuck beef is two spoonfuls of black pepper, parsley, and seasoned salt. Source: the group home cookbook. When the game warden dragged a bull off the autumn highway or hauled a warm-bellied cow some poacher left to rot, he phoned us. I…

  • The Queen of Truth

    If torture is the Queen of Truth then what is the King of Truth? Could it be the Black Dog, ennui, accidia, can the King rule by the weight of the ink (oh, I pray not the pixels!) on an execution order? Could the King be numbed by dum-dum fever? Could the King be a…

  • Piece by Piece

    1.          Construction When the road was not a road but a flooded mouth of broken teeth husband and wife parked at the spring-swollen dam. Above a chorus of peepers they bickered the radio news unloading their haul: soft pine, tongue, groove. They shouldered the wood under a catchpenny moon. A quarter mile down they filled…

  • Israel

    Steam lifting from the highways, ascendingto the heavens beneath the misery of commute,fires below the pavement. I have become a better driver by the standards of Houston.I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt.No, OK, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All this blinding steel and glass, we’ve madethe world a brighter…

  • Often, Common, Some, and Free

    Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saywe leave that field open, as inwe don’t complete the form. I see nothing heresays it is required.Maybe this is the other kindof field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me.Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saythere’s an Adirondack chair, the affordable plastic kind.Maybe those are rubber.Maybe…