someone keeps snipping our frayed bottoms off and sticking our necks in cold water. Tonight, nothing revives us. Everything is Hail Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. I am sick to death of their lot. O tragedy, o fringy queen, that old scene. What do they do with the stars at night? Pluck them out as like…
after Pavese October: gravity and annulling wind pinioning the limbs of the fruit trees, the glinty olives; the cannon-gray dawn auguring a long, lax day of rain— Where once a young god breathed, whose footsteps astonished the earth, whom Viking sadness touched hardly at all, like a cloud’s frail shadow, now, at the windowsill, a…
for Gertrude Stein O gloves of Sweden, you with the suede verbs, whoever yearns for you has more than earned her heap of earth and its kern and slur of notes. How much space should we leave between words? Enough for Elijah to come in or for love to let itself out? Let it be…
Its deep green lancelets open as psalms above the knotted, black stems; a promise of bud in two years’ time frozen hard in the cells like the possibility of migraine or sickle cell in blood, the low hum of obesity turned to tuber-shaped, scaled appearances; a pink, soft frost or gilding; padmokasa bulbed out of…
Not the ratcheting crescendo of Ravel’s bright winds but an older, crueler passion: a woman with hips who knows when to move them, who holds nothing back but the hurt she takes with her as she dips, grinds, then rises sweetly into his arms again. Not delicate. Not tame. Bessie Smith in a dream of…
In spite of what we know about the millionth chance, whose lessons on statistics prove our lives will glint unchanged from month to month, we scrape gold tinfoil off the quick picks, shove half-dollars in the one-armed bandits, move to cities where new money rings a bell. Our self-renewing visions of a trove though toxic…
The uppercase motions sustained their forms of cruelty. I tried to delineate fictions, But the math of things was small. It did not give me room to take my cup. It did not give me room to speak an answer. In the diluted sunlight, a world rolled off. I barely recognized the sinking myth. It…
In the middle of the hunt, I must excuse myself, and all through silent polished halls feel the dog-breath on my sling-back heels. Being flesh, being always hungry, I mostly swallow what is thrown. But am not glutton, but furnace burning punishments. And know the protocol for butchery, but cannot call it to my mind….
loquitur: Anton Raphael Mengs Court-Painter elect to Charles III of Spain Signori, you have my gratitude for the signal honor of this banquet, the learned discourses, as well as, of course, the great distinction of your company. “Old Mengs,” you call me among yourselves, and it is true: I am …
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