Poetry

  • THE HOLIDAYS

    The old city rushes into me as soon as the planedescends, and my drunk bravado shudders.I swear to myself that I will not confrontmy family with my suffering this time around.I’ll be a civilized person instead and keeplongstanding resentment to myself. Even the partof me that is gristle and nerve is strangelyquiet. The dot dot…

  • LEFTOVERS

    When I needed a Barden bumper for my bumper-less truck, I walked through a junkyard: bolts & gauges on the ground, wheels rolling nowhere or steering nothing, dead headlights illuminated by sunbeams. A bird alit on chrome. I shivered at the delicacy of what I could not see: a laugh & This is my favorite…

  • POEM

    You will never finish your lifethe way you intended.The bed you will never get up fromis not the one you wanted,by a lake or river’s edgewhere the light toucheseach bird awakeexcept the onethat kept watch all night.

  • [It is like a long tunnel]

    It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallwayshining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kindsof places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivitythey want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I readonce that they change a person…

  • Polar Sight

    Remember the snowed-in highway, the saloon dressed up like a chalet, the auroral sunset falling minute by minute on that lonely desert town? And him watching me as I played dead in the snow— like a salt flat, the snow outside so bright even at dusk and midnight— until I opened my eyes and saw…

  • Book of Dolls 47

    I hurt, my mother said over and over, and powerless to end her misery, we hurt in kind and never quite enough. I am sorry, I said. I say it still. I apologize for experience, aka the world, who could not be here today and sends her condolences. I am sorry, I say from a…