Poetry

She was old, my mother, and dead now, or so they said, and I could think of nothing but boiling pots of water.   Out the window, November’s birds pecking the dry grass.   More and more water I boiled, watching it hiss and spit, roil and seethe.   She was old, my mother, and…

All I ever needed to bring up with her was cranberries. She brightened no one’s eyes; I befriended her frown. Bogs, she says, when I rhyme fog. Bone-chilling overcast, she affirms damply. Wouldn’t you like to slip away from your burned house and head to the cold coast, even if they have to search for…

I’d bring them home in jars, in my bare hands, or sometimes wound around my arms: garter snakes, with their sleek yellow stripes, dull brown lizards their spiny toes and jagged sides. Once, a baby ringneck snake, no bigger than my pinkie, wearing its thin choker of coral.   In Barbados, at my grandparents’, it…

I always wanted a daughter, which is to say, I wanted a better self,   flicked from my marrow—made flesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones   to move in the world, exceptional and unharmed. Not this world. But a world   almost exactly unlike it. Same paved streets and street cafés, same slow   unfurl of…

Italic Z of snow. A perhaps raptor’s nest           beside it in the pine. Families are going in at dusk, voices fading like numbers          on used tram tickets run over in the parking lot. Small bag of dog shit placed beside a rusty pole. Sometimes even outdoors there’s a stress you can’t get out of, spinning…

for MW     How do you hope to survive?   & not just that:            was it even the question?   By midday the fog was burning off;;   screech & call beside the anyway::: :::          the parent osprey had gone out            looking for the right fish   (did it fear stone?)          & bryophytes rested on the soil   as…

after Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019)     I met a hapless man a literary critic —but I’m not only that I’m a poet myself—   he said we are fond of you your poems are charming but don’t ask us to read them   we cannot   there are certain poems we simply cannot tolerate the…

Does it surprise you to learn that I once had a wife? Someone to whom I showed my wounds, who made me dangerous because, at unstrung moments with her, I was so happy? It’s not something I talk easily about. She vowed to help me get my fate straight, a task obviously not within her…

A coyote runs across the dirt road and into the woods. Light gray fur, all haunches and tail. Nuisance.           I have seen her running once before like an animal released, breath of everything filling her lungs.                     Desire or flight? I could not tell from my car, the windshield covered in dust and pollen—feeling grizzled myself,…