Poetry

I let a boy lick my paper skin because he told me I was pretty. I let a man undress me, because he wouldn’t stop kissing me. I left my body at a party, and then I left it again. A secret: sadness has no sound—not crying, just silence, like how at 5:00 a.m. I…

He was looking for news of the world. He was looking for his daughter who died in the fire, the car that burst into flames, the crash, his wife who left him for her lover, he was looking   at the world through a window in the den, where he kept the photographs and the…

There was some connection to be made— your death, the election, the absurd snow— and I charged myself with making it, walking down Court Street after therapy, passing under mantled elms, watching the skaters’ ankles brace against the weight of their careening. In the rink’s center, a girl spun herself into a small torpedo, red…

I am searching for the phrenic nerve when I remember the bad feeling I have about you.   Formalin pricking my nose, an attentive hush pressing all around me. This test is timed, but I look into the body, and I’m lost.   The word itself makes me anxious, sounds frantic, frenetic. Lightning strike climbing…

I go into our bedroom closet with its one blue work shirt, the cuffs   frayed, the paint stains a loopy non- narrative of color, of spirit.   Now that you are bodiless and my body’s no longer the body you knew,   it’s good to be reminded every morning of the great mess, the…

My brother is lost. I can’t find my brother. I say it over again— when I lost my brother. A back road I knew once and now   can’t find. A specific wave on John’s Pond. The last one we saw there, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one   office to the…

That afternoon, Bovary went to the apothecary’s closet, fumbling for arsenic to draw out her black bile, make her mouth a hole. She waited hours for the worst of it, the shearing of her dark lovely hair— though for many years my mother’s hair was not lovely but thin as sagebrush an autumn fire had…

I like the idea of a spratchet, which today I learned is the plastic divider used in checkout lines that says this is almost mine and this is almost yours. I like how it helps two strangers not skinny dip in the reservoirs of each other’s bank accounts. And there’s nothing rude about a spratchet—…

In the tradition of aunts and nieces we were traveling on the continent, and, as in the tradition, she had no child; we slept in one room, in one bed.   What of men? I would sit in the hotel window in Paris, looking at the people on the street below— they held no interest….