Poetry

  • Flesh

    At night the earth’s flesh shifts, which makes the house sigh in its sleep, which sends a shiver through the wood-bones of my bed, which makes me stand up in my dream and climb a hillside flush with gorse and may. I lie down on the peak and feel the kick-punch-kick, and wonder what the…

  • Up Jumped Spring

    for Nana What’s most fantastical almost always goes unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring. Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee your night, creameries your dream factories. Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth can still be the same…

  • Hail to the Artist

    translated by Marilyn Hacker In the country, he talks to her about art About love, about life, he says that he creates And he loves, she says that his painting Is rubbish, he says that art is life, She says that he’s a layabout, He plays at pricking her with a blade of grass, she…

  • The Closet

    Whether in chrome surgery or gymnasium toilet— everyone is expelled bloody and bleating, tube attached from mass to mass, the slick itself turning vivid. Whether there or in this floor-through, Mother, I have missed you terribly— miss you, though I know about mothering myself. * This afternoon Madeline Carmichael, 61, was convicted of fatally beating…

  • Tight Line

    There’s no bobber at the surface. Nothing between you but trust in dumb suck on rubber boots & faith’s rusted buckles sunk into mud banks. Eyes trained on the current backed up against itself like a row of empty boxcars. Nylon wound around an index finger, stand ready for a tug come alive. When a…

  • Goldsboro Narrative #45

    The whites and the blacks are still newcomers. You can tell: the way we claim flags, that we fight. The other nomads were moved on, learning that land does not love humans and is not at home with us, even when it lets us grow ourselves food, even when it lets us house our dead….

  • Going to Hear My Child’s Heartbeat for the First Time–Part 2

    it’s the girl in deep water who will not drown           (drum) come down (drum) come down           (drum) zora’s instrument hidden in the belly (drum) carried across the atlantic           (drum) it’s a mystery to master (drum) it don’t stop           (drum) don’t stop (drum) gotta story to tell           (drum) won’t stop (drum)…

  • Cutting Hair

    She pays attention to the hair, not her fingers, and cuts herself once or twice a day. Doesn’t notice anymore, just if the blood starts flowing. Says, Excuse me, to the customer and walks away for a Band-Aid. Same spot on the middle finger over and over, raised like a callus. Also the nicks where…