Poetry

Something’s kept me away, perhaps an all-too-familiar voice laced with paranoia streaming through a phone unhooked from its cradle, dangling in that empty room. Hanging up not an option. Her ashes in an urn for the third straight year and now I wonder how it was I never could get through to her. Yet here…

He wanted a cave. Spoke back to vices out of the alley, where hummers and hearses flashed like a toy gun’s blanks. Coats he lent to children raised by wolves. In a classroom, the uniforms asked him to write his name over and over. Then he auctioned his wife. He wanted a cave they gave…

The idea for moth came when soliciting the moth. Moth? Is there more than one solitary powder? Moth: contiguous end-time pellets precede the grackle supper ring. The idea for elk came when I felt this elk rejecting me. I looked at him and he looked at me but the sensation was missing. It was as…

As were the others realized rather than invented. Diamonds write on glass. François 1er, 16thc. idly etching women are fickle into the pane as he stood gazing out over the river or on water will this                                       diamond ring engender that which changed it, changèd were                                       for:                                       diamond is to ocean                                       what…

You were not gone but asleep through the slideshow, and you were gone the projector pointing skyward, the ceiling quivering with our faces. Are there many sizes of infinity? These are stars, this the black tank, circular glass, a worldless plankton, which are leave, a worldless plankton, which are come. Wake now. O mountains O…

Intense bursts of energy are now emanating from the sun. And     you are lit from within. Like it ain’t no thing. “I am lit from within!” The seconds so     facile to glitter through. But there is only so much a light switch can do for you. Soon the     fog resolves the gold….

We keep this distance. One distance. Many of us. From the guide with the snake in the pillowcase. Though no safe distance. So we close in. * He says the venom would end it in minutes, an errant life closed in, now coiled and digestive, now currented lashing at the bag, a line snapping on…

You would not have known me. I saw contradictions beneath every event. Rose garden or gas station? Swimming pool or eternity? I might look up, convinced something had ended, or something had begun. As I walked between bedrooms and pharmacies, I might come to a furious pitch. One month I thought I was marked. I…

“And therein found this face” there at the bottom          something moved behind the panel sliding, the habit of inhabiting. We were hungry. We turned into hands and then into shadows of hands moving at the back of the mirror. They poured liquid metal across flattened panes. Ice upon ice: antimony, lead, colophonium                   (once…