Poetry

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…

I’m thinking about the lives                                         that failed to choose me.Night’s vast ballroom, its stuttering chandelier.Fossilized beneath refrigerator magnetsis a reverie of expired coupons, clipped from the pagesof fate’s circular.                     You can’t live in the what-ifbut you can vacation there, can’t you?I hitch one end of my hammock to the finitein infinite, the other I slip…

After summer, I clear away the vulgar corpsesfrom my flower beds: coarse vinca, shriveledmarigold, and molding lupine drained of colorby an infestation of aphids that sucked its sweetsap dry, I learned too late. My son, who spurnedmy breast as an infant, still refuses most food.He’s skinny, nothing like these soft-bellied bugsalmost mewling at the clusters…

My father smoked a pipe,loved to stare in the camera’s eye,make of it a twinkle or a wink,those were the days of ginand tonic, those were the dayswhen he believed in the magicof his fertile brain—they calledhis body genius, the masteryover bat and ball, the lithein his walk, the musclesof youth—and in his brain,sparing, alert,…

in that realm, a man of straw can pass for a man. sleep him in the woods on a horse’s skull—skull so he dreams of echoes, horse so his heart learns to gallop. unlearn him the language of his starving mother, pull his shoulders back, and he’ll swagger. he’ll see a blooming meadow and think,…