Poetry

I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…

Maybe your baby done made some other plans. —Stevie Wonder Out of a cinched sack of bones, the dog’s half-cast opiate eyes ask can’t you hear the moths, pelting the pear glass? & then there is nothing else I can hear, bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars of snow spot the porch, blast the…

In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…

Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…

There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…

It’s only a pile of sticks in the woods. My sisters go to bed after me. It’s only a pile of sticks arranged counterclockwise, like a funnel. My sisters don’t know I’m really clear-headed when my mother stands outside the window. My teacher is scared of someone standing where she can’t see, someone really there,…

Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…

When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…

May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…