Poetry

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…

At the age of eleven, he composes a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. Finds it easiest to hear people when they’re asleep: a sound that comes from their dreams. Secretly takes his pulse several times a day in flesh and in vain. Pascal despairs of the husk, delights in the spark, fears…

As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night,         swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding, kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the         tea curtain with a misplaced elbow, unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques,         his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings, his…

I’m a cipher. Before that, I was a loose cannon. Before that, I was a zealot. I preached on the street corners. I accosted strangers in subways to tell them I had good news for them. Before that, I worked on the assembly line in a fireworks factory. I stuck fuses in firecrackers and poured…

That story I told you about suffering Was a lie. I never wandered into The woods with a pack of matches. Truth is I was born there, and there I ran the weather. Deer left Apples in my hand, so I didn’t think To cook the deer. The secret of my Life was my life,…

at your marker (they call it a marker) a footstone hipper than headstones           earlier mapquest led to metro north           google to the most reliable cab service in peekskill I bring wheat      tall dry half-live stalks           bought the day before           (new york has everything)           no one questions the harvest shooting from…

I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…

There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…

It’s only a pile of sticks in the woods. My sisters go to bed after me. It’s only a pile of sticks arranged counterclockwise, like a funnel. My sisters don’t know I’m really clear-headed when my mother stands outside the window. My teacher is scared of someone standing where she can’t see, someone really there,…