Poetry

The Milky Way’s glinting ribbon helps the dung beetleroll his good ball of shit back to the ones he loves.But blind him to the sky with as little as a hat,and he will swerve like a drunk who, if he makes it home alive, might find the family, soured with waiting,gone. Drawers cleared, beds cold,…

I miss the charcoal drawing of gallium that hung in my chemistry class. How the metal whose melting point is below human body temperature was misspelled galium, how the hand cupping the silver goop stopped at the wrist. I don’t think it was meant to disturb, to invoke a caught thief. I don’t think the charcoal spreading…

Here’s where I leave you. A dream, a quiver. A ficklebit of light after the rain. Squint: I can’t really remembernow where I was going. We lick the haze, open ourlips, find again pleasure in what we nibble aimlessly. Seconds become minutes always, but sometimeshours forget the days. There are two threads: The onewe follow…

An Elvis impersonatorcurling his lipas he limbers up for “Return to Sender,”a wave may develop that slight curling of the liptill it becomes a sneer.Not that a wave may more than slightly develop.The character of Snare becomes a sneerno less than Master Fang,the character of Snarebeing in a funk no less than his buddy, Master…

When I gave up praying,an $800 windfall arrived in the mailand no longer did I brew my tearsinto a bitter tea that paid the bills. Though it turned out to be surplus in theescrow account, once I’d have chalked it upto God—that unexpected checka biscuit for the trick I’d been taught. But what, if not…

The whale was real.                                        So was the beach, carsick                                        & damp in the armpits as I was.Father’s shaggy hunk                                        of leg against my young flank.The crowd on the shoulder                                        of the road watching the crowd                                        smoke around the whaleI mistook for a stranded barrel.                                        Did it outswell the ocean                                        with breathing, was it yearling                                        white, bruised like light                                        entering a dark room, in its…

This condition is not like hoarding for winter.                    There may be no torpor here,                                                                       no feast, either. I see a fox, petrified in bog water.                    I envy the gall wasp, its egg                                                               a pincushion on the oak leaf. This disruption will likely stay                                                        unnamed. I call it                    faceful of dove. I call it                    glass-choked gladiola. I know                    too little of life. I forget…

Please don’t ever ask me to do it—to run throughthe plot points A, B, C, and D, as Peter Brooksdiscusses in his famous book of the same name.My mind is allergic to chronology. Do you feelthe unquenchable thirst for plot that Brooks describes?OK, then, here’s a plot for you: last night, I sawtwo guys in…

On the television the boy is watching Charlotte’s Web & it is near the beginningwhere the whole family is sitting down to eat & we are made to see the farmer’sbreakfast—a stack of pancakes, golden brown & towering—& the boy becomes caught in this moment. He will watch the movie it feels like hundreds of…