Poetry

We went to see The Book of Mormon (the musical). I was working on my own musical, The Book of Mermen “Merman? As in Ethel Merman?” No, I said, The Book of Mermen, those quizzical mythical beasts half fish half man. Though I could see where Ethel Merman would make sense as a musical—an excruciating…

Spring rolls in hard—swift, brash, heedless. Box elder saplings, blackberry and burdock break ground any place we leave alone.   A dozen dark purple tulips sprang up by the front steps. Did we plant them? Another gesture I can’t remember—   what I conceived, things I once said with such conviction. How I got from…

The rear view camera is why they hate us. Active Park Assist, so you can have a car, not learn to parallel park. Also Las Vegas, the decadent west. All You Can Eat is why they hate us, our fat ass falling off the edges of our chair. Our sturdy-ass chairs is why they hate…

after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan. A widow who’s spent her life working in a silk factory finally decides   to sacrifice everything for the sake of her only son’s one wish: to study in Tokyo.   “Be a great man,” she tells him. He’s all she has.   Twelve years later, she…

unfolds over the piano      played by my son’s teacher   as he watches at her side.      Builds slowly, with stories   of farmland, splintered barns,      pumpkin patches rolling   toward bay, toward ocean.      Of yellow mustard fields,   of fishing nets, of rivers      gone dry. Of cemeteries   where my mother and I      must linger…

about rugs and the fluid acres weft from silk worms and sea grass, a      deep plush to muzzle the floors, the daze of medallions, how stains darken with      time, rugs and how we cross them, leave the slight crushmarks of      our feet talk about closets, doors and how the air stills when you shut them,…

I slept under highways. Railroad blankets. Pale blue sections of tarp. Boathouses. Scaffold of downtown apartments. Black clouds above me, the shadows of mountains like mountains of darkness themselves. In Paris I slept in the Rodin garden. The fountain turned off. The pigeons disappeared to their quiet corners in bushes. I stayed up most nights,…

One friend decided to forego sugar for a month. Another the word wept. A third quit therapy in favor of praising the aubergine tinge in the clouds   that served as backdrop to the tree limbs falling through his mother’s yard. Sometimes I want to give up living by lists and information, yet I still…

When I’m sick, I wish     whatever song is in my head would stop. Tonight, it’s the same     tune my mother sang to tuck me in, its notes      the kind of kindness only distant trains still hit—soft     like a string of Christmas lights sort-of      smiling from a darkened window—the same tune     I took up, humming some, to steel myself against…