Poetry

on the front steps ofsome young professional’sapartment in Boston.                    She smokesI hold my breathit is hard for both of usto breathe.Her: heavy doses of medsMe: small doses of medsmeant to make seeing herless painful, other thingsless crushing.                    Today it is hotshe tries to blow her cigarettesmoke away from meshe doesn’t know muchabout me anymorebut she knows I’ve…

The window is a world,the trees continents, complicated,crowding the blue and hazy shoreand that house, that house over there,my mistakes come to rest in the landscape.How did they find me,invisible, behind glass? How did theybecome so solid, so fixed and neighborly,more vigilant each day, looking outfor any errant kindness that mightpass by, and shatter the…

I buried my girlhood in the garden where nothing grows,at the bottom of the river that runs through it. I buried the hair ribbons and skirts with shorts sewn underneath,buried the blow-up pool and flamingo floaties, the plush lamb tied to a string. My girlhood, sunburned with skinned knees,leaving wet footprints on patio stones. My…

I will always remember Pythagorasbecause of you. An artistnot a scholar, carpenter, or for that matter a teacher at all—even in grade eight we understoodyou taught a2 + b2 = c2 for three straight months because it was the only math you knew and our regular teacher with his re-heated coffees and summer turtlenecksrefused to return from stress leave.At the…

For a decade, I smoked a pack a day.It wasn’t the drug I craved but pure,gleaming abandon. At sixteen, I benta car around a tree and loved the momentwhen I slipped headfirst from the webbedglass into a pool of streetlight, a puddleof my own blood. Sliding from the wreckinto a bright new realm, wet with…

Which weight did I know and which did I fail to carry?And what does one red cardinal weigh atop a wooden fence?In front of the yellow siding? The weight of. Please spare mewhat a man might own, what he might lift overhead, hoist once. Before his bones grow hollow, his mind grows dense.Which weight did…

In the house made of guns in the citymade of guns on the street lit with lead, my father sits building a new room.This is to be my room, with a scope for a window, the crosshairsof white wood across the glass framing the yard with the hollowed-outpine tree crooked from the last storm. I…

It was despite, or because of the rain. It wasbecause of the hot summer night, heavy and wetlike roof insulation left out in unwrapped stacksat the cottage that never got finished.It was because it was too hot to breathe,and jumping in the lake was the only relief.It was because our clothes felt wet and weighted,even…

It opens in the light of day. A roofless Mustang, blue& winding electric along a cliff’s side. Through static, I humThis Will Be. We’re so close to lethal—an easy tip & it’s over.I’m finally learning to drive. At the DMV, you’ll shout theletters on the vision chart so I’ll remember from across the room.Love is…