Poetry

a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase that explains everything and then you’re revoking yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan or you’ve just changed the…

I took absence down to the ocean and because it is blind, I told it about the waves. I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my arms around the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges. I walked beside absence in the streets at night and I let it tell…

Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of moon into the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love me any more than he loves a river. I move to another room, closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the…

“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,” (1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was gutted but the crumpling warehouse and its contents: medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. THEY’RE LIKE TREASURE MAPS, someone said of the half-charred scraps. But they weren’t. This was the opposite—…

It’s 11:02. I was supposed to take the kids outside at 10:13. My underwear is over my head. I’m trying to sniff out the boy I once was, my private parts tiny and nutmeg. I didn’t give a shit about Superman. I was in love with Watergate. Watergate was my super hero. All that corruption….

In this new country of ours we will, let’s face it, be endlessly debating, endlessly refining, so much talking!—at least in the beginning, when we’ve just arrived. And probably later as well, always arriving as we are in this mortality, with so much to say and so little mind-reading. We will continue to use words…

In our new country we will notice, cherish, entirely disregard time, inhale hours and exhale days, float and surf and snorkel into the minutes and years, time like a blanket over or under us, wrapped around our beachchilled skin. Our time will be free of owners, a fact of life on this particular planet, like…

In the new country we will bike through the town in most weather, barrowing smaller humans or parcels in the front when we must or like, pulling wagons, flashing our prettiest wheel-lights at night, double-riding, even triple-riding. Mostly we will wheel through the streets at a leisurely speed allowing for chitchat, perhaps playing the old…

In our new country, all toilets will be composting toilets, inside or outhouse, some with wide stalls for wheelchairs, some with built-in steps for small humans, mostly sit-down and some with urinals, for easiest collection of the pee we will feed microbial fuel cells from which later we will shear electricity. And we will build…