Poetry

Sonnet

Retinal snowfall, anything that slips, where children kick a snowman in the dim winter increment, the gray of 3 p.m. Two red cars, one blue. White wing that dips and opens softly in the eyes’ ellipse, an n dimension furling at the rim— a down is paling—shyer motions limn, shyest motions adumbrate the tips— the…

In the B Movie of Our Lives

In the B movie of our lives, there are no panoramas; our limitations have perfected the close-up. Pain is confined to what is visible: slump of the left shoulder, elbow on the table. There’s only room for subplot this side of the proverbial tracks. Sound of vengeance like a passing train, sweet and noble journey…

Pumpkin-envy

How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets, thought’s curare, when I finally dialed Tami Jamison, numbing my lips too much to speak? How often did I think, “I’m dead,” feeling my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs, sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of…

Going Bananas

My father rises each morning to the fourteen varieties of banana trees he’s cultivated with unrivaled care, each tree casting shade across our lawn, each racimo an offering my father hacks with his machete, a small cruelty he performs like a doctor circumcising a newborn, though I like to think he is unburdening these trees,…

(Stills)

We undress shy as a gun. * The mailman’s son, I am nor snow, nor night, nor gloom. * Her eyelashes long & false as an alarm. * He say, she say, foreplay, amscray. * Her cocktail dress pours over my bare floor. * Her feather boa hissing yes. * Without her I am incomplete—…

Forest Neurotica

Slow drag— forest——otica A camera embedded in the eye of a butterfly’s hind wing captures gilded swans choking on cream. I can’t see the trees for the ugly irises. Like a honey thief flying at ground level, I gorge on the secret source of a runaway brook I have tied to a string. Night in…

Rich World

Like a store for the too-well-off and unashamed, it is uncontained as the fists of tulips breaking through the last crust of snow. Avast, they say in books from the bookshelf about pirates, and there are windows yet to break, phone lines left to splice into and travel on down to the groves of Florida…

Solitude

It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…