Poetry

Apology

Lately, too much disturbed, you stay breathing in me and I believe you. How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces…

Introduction to Disease

Call me Responsible.                                    (Like all of them                                    it loves an exam.) Pleased to meetcha. A charming living space.                                    Thank you.                                    All original, naturally. Tongue?                      Not telling. (Funny little factory.)                                    I know my diagnosis.                                    Friendlier than the world.                                    Friendlier than the world. Well do yourself a favor they say…

Dear Rome

Sometimes I touch the cleaner. Sometimes an hourly vole shares the bed and wife with me. Once I sat up suddenly and spoke it: crowned platelets inherit the passenger bin. I believe the precise moment of Rapture is felt not to occur, the Rind of Incidence I made up in the first place. On a…

Two Women

                    1. There goes a difference between his mother’s death in the shallow woods by shots or hacking late autumn/winter and tufted oak leaves framing her and His mother’s death of disease in the windless cube and pinned to the line bed stand cluttered with spectral elixirs and the carefree agents of interiority tapping on…

Habitat

Hampered sky, unworldly, cleaving a stranger from me and placing her at my earpiece, and further— what goods move inside her? She wears a theatrical scent like a language, a musk, and she does not wear well. She wears unwell. On the furthest mound, the one cresting above the pond-formation, smitten with wings and throat-calls,…

Headset

The sun gives us our genesis, he said, but is not itself the genesis     of our being. Connected. Yet portable, I countered, sauntering down the carpeted hallway     speaking seductively into. My floating microphone. Much like the current rash of pop-     show singers, who may dance. As if possessed by demons while lip-synching,…

Fifth Circle (The Wrathful)

Tap tap, you’ve planted a scarecrow at the center of your field of broken stones. Watch it grow, watch it. You’ve nailed her to the desolation tree blossoming over this field where somebody buried seed long ago. Bone hammer, crooked hammer, thing nailed to a tree. What love would look like. What home would look…

Aster

Among the peopled flowers my legitimate crankiness forced into diaspora, none have been more far-flung than the aster. I do not understand how such star structures are formed. Unlike me, the aster throws rays blazing from white to pink or purple about a disk that is usually yellow. Flower heads of a composite type leave…

The Invention of the Nightwatch

was the often walks            it’s in all the books—psalms, Solomon,                                           the ones with all the pictures of men walking at night.      A legion of staves, and etched onto the leaves,            where here I have witnessed some blind world of the blind beneath a torch held in a sheaf on which sketched, a face,   Says…