Poetry

I tie my hat—I crease my shawl (522) —Emily Dickinson   is carried crown first through light that hums. Her country is built of two rooms: need and desire. Birds rarely come near. She cannot see her shoes or the tops of buildings or the moon. She wonders if she is kind. She is as…

From the Museum of Failed Masters     Here you will feel no ecstasy, no bright imperative to weep, or to give thanks, or to endure. Instead, we offer solace in what’s gaudy, saccharine, timid, tame: in trees rigidly perfect, Christs with too-white teeth, a sunset blushing at its own excess. The portraits here preserve…

You have to feel your feelings     Right now I feel amused, uncomfortable, tolerant, with a twist in my heart, as if I’m applying for a visa to the country of unhappiness and sorrow which gets mixed reviews on Trip Advisor. In this waiting room, we are all seedy & hopeless and the elephant…

The Milky Way’s glinting ribbon helps the dung beetle roll his good ball of shit back to the ones he loves. But blind him to the sky with as little as a hat, and he will swerve like a drunk who, if he makes it home alive,   might find the family, soured with waiting,…

I miss the charcoal drawing of gallium that hung in my chemistry class. How the metal whose melting point is below human body temperature was misspelled galium, how the hand cupping the silver goop stopped at the wrist. I don’t think it was meant to disturb, to invoke a caught thief. I don’t think the charcoal spreading…

Here’s where I leave you. A dream, a quiver. A fickle bit of light after the rain. Squint: I can’t really remember now where I was going. We lick the haze, open our lips, find again pleasure in what we nibble aimlessly.   Seconds become minutes always, but sometimes hours forget the days. There are…

An Elvis impersonator curling his lip as he limbers up for “Return to Sender,” a wave may develop   that slight curling of the lip till it becomes a sneer. Not that a wave may more than slightly develop. The character of Snare   becomes a sneer no less than Master Fang, the character of…

When I gave up praying, an $800 windfall arrived in the mail and no longer did I brew my tears into a bitter tea that paid the bills.   Though it turned out to be surplus in the escrow account, once I’d have chalked it up to God—that unexpected check a biscuit for the trick…

The whale was real.                                         So was the beach, carsick                                         & damp in the armpits as I was. Father’s shaggy hunk                                         of leg against my young flank. The crowd on the shoulder                                         of the road watching the crowd                                         smoke around the whale I mistook for a stranded barrel.                                         Did it outswell the ocean                                         with breathing, was…