Poetry

which is a biographical fact only ever stated when discussing a man of either unrivaled righteousness or extreme wickedness. Imagine this: He never once used a bell in his saliva experiments, unless you count the plink of kibble falling from his dogs’   surgically opened throats, and why would you want to count that? I…

A term given to us by Franz Gall, father of phrenology, the lost art of God’s failure   to erase each ridge and bump from your skull. For which Gall invented his method   to codify God’s errors: a bump for adventurers and a bump for homebodies.   A bump for the vicious and a…

Lugging a corpse with you everywhere you went. Strapped to your back. Slumped in a wheelchair. Dragged on a sled or pulled in a red wagon. The corpse keeping you focused on your mortality. Reminding you that ultimately you’re just a corpse.   At first it was a fringe thing. Hipsters only. Then celebrities got…

for C.P.   What to do with all this flame but douse it with paper cupfuls of red and yellow pills. What to do with the sun that licks its rose blaze in the tiled corners of this ward, with the hours, with the burden of relief we’re allowed to feel. We still breathe. We…

He said he would hang himself so as not to make a mess.   But he was still there the next day. And the next. And the next.   He wrote the note for the cops on a page he tore from my favorite book   of poems. That’s all I saw of it— in…

I don’t remember wearing it to school or after dark   to the Halloween party where apples for bobbing   floated in tubs. I don’t remember staring   in the mirror to admire myself in the half-   mask, white blouse and black skirt, the fabled red hood   gaudy with sequins. My father paid…

Three days after my chemo infusion, the hospital Chapel’s framed inspirational words wishing us well in moving forward, I send myself flying   with frozen lips and bad ski equipment, arms and legs dragging against the winter’s cold molecules— no longer regretting the frilly white gift   saved from the affair in Vaduz that I…

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers…

In this poem someone has taken the edge of one hand & swept the crumbs from the counter. In this poem we save what falls & Jesus speaks lightly, a breeze carrying the river’s scent. And all the day & night of this poem a face asks what’s left after science, after the black &…