Poetry

                    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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

Adumbrate. Omne animalum               post coitam tristam sunt. Had this boyfriend once recited Latin to me as we walked across the campus to B & E an empty house—some physics major. I thought romantic. As in, the streetcast shadow adumbrates the sleeping wall. A fickle, melancholy, sketchy trait. See more at umbrage. And if I partially…

Do you have roots? Or do you picture yourself an astronaut inside      a bubble suit. Altitudinous above the troposphere, suspended like candy below     the exosphere. Connected to a stalled, mechanized version of your future self by     a twisting. Gold umbilicus: how sweet to be (simultaneously) the     perpetrator and the crime’s. Sole…

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…