Poetry

He asks what I want him to do to me, the next move capable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked. I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell him how I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms. I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealed by the still-brown trees…

Letter openers, proving we miss people urgently. Bottlecaps popping with satisfactory sound. All the miraculous ways to experience time— a roller coaster, a deep breath in sideways snow, flicker of windowsill basil glimpsed from an El stop at dusk. City streets patterned like plaid in a dishrag filling with sun. Portable stoves. Recycled stationary. The…

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront  pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit  flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward stars where we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys.  Once we were…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawings of a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hall singing about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musical and was a farmer, but wanted to be…

What have you done? Opened this box of sound, warped like sand beneath water, remember that? The waves of perception moving you away from me. We grow farther apart, but we are equal in our ignorance of how. No change there. Like celestial bodies distancing—like the animals in autumn. How? This knowledge, how will you…

After the protest at dusk, two policemen on horseback closing the park approached me and Vita and offered us rides home. Sheepish but game, we grabbed hold of their leather and galloped across field and hill to the edge. Gassed and smiling, we waved goodbye. Jim was waiting at the restaurant. I wanted to tell…

My mother was once held at knifepoint for a day. The man positioned the blade at the blue places of her pulse, as if tracing the ground for water, divining as it’s known. Or maybe I’m thinking of the pointed device that searches for sapphire, bright veins beneath the earth. Throughout my childhood, I imagined…

PUNISH THE SHOOTER, NOT THE GUN is a hard line to take seriously, as seen on the bumper of an old Dodge hearse spray-painted black and gold, passing on the right. If I honk, will he think friend or foe? A question best left rhetorical, so I keep my hands at ten and two and…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell. It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves run roughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you, I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl…