Poetry

  • Parable: Jackrabbit Belly

    Yesterday, jackrabbit belly was not a color. Today I hold a paint strip to the wall, and it’s true: this is the exact shade of a rabbit’s soft fur, of the sepia robe of St. Francis, whose followers swirled like birds, or were birds, St. Francis being one willing to trade like for like. An…

  • Surfacing

    Two women are walking on the ocean floor I’m the one in front, holding an oxygen mask then passing it back to my mother We take turns She breathes I breathe She breathes I breathe We can’t talk we just keep walking and breathing and sometime towards morning I notice she’s gone A bit of…

  • Ways to Harm a Thing

    Throw scissors at it.
 Fill it with straw
 and set it on fire, or set it
 off for the colonies with only
 some books and dinner-
 plates and a stuffed bear
 named Friend Bear for me
 to lose in New Jersey.
 Did I say me? Things
 have been getting
 less and less hypothetical
 since I…

  • Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood

    every day someone finds what they need in someone else you tear into a body and come out with a fistful of the exact feathers you were looking for wondering why anyone would want to swallow so many perfect feathers everyone looks uglier naked or at least I do my pillar of fuzz my damp…

  • Face the Music (Solo 5.1)

    Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, but he and his Intergalactic Arkestra still had to suffer the trials of earthly travel. When his agent phoned us to say they’d be driving up early, a day before their hotel was expecting them, we had to scramble to find beds. Adam, our piano player, lived in…

  • Canasta

    Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housed household added to another, all abandoned and made to abandon their names. A non-colonnade of gray clods. A un-quadrangle of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade of ashes. Ditch-buried hordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisoned necropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settled precincts of our planet—or…

  • Wellfleet, Off-Season

    The walls inside the city buildings curve, glass and plaster bending in thigh-shape, or breast-shape, a comfort to patients in RECEPTION, waiting to have their griefs or gallbladders removed, tumors and proud flesh pulled from the body, snipped off by the healer who has no sodden breast to offer in return, no nutriment, but only…

  • Blowjob

    It’s just like the tongue, isn’t it, to fold you up into a tiny origami swan whose angled wings splay and whose jutted neck and beak point out over some expanse of water a tugboat hauling the mammoth frigate upstream the reckless kayaker tickling an eddy the currents changing temperature beneath your feet as you…