Tanks run over the castle of my childhood in December. On our black-and-white TV I see the riot police shields and truncheons. Vinegar is the only thing you can buy in the stores. Telephones turn into toys. Because of a curfew, my father’s bedtime stories grow longer than ivy and wilder than calendula. Restless…
When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue, as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaper licking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silence which is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical…
sometimes I’m issued a new head and the old one drops off and then I see the new one isn’t new it’s a used head, sometimes a bit moldy or flushed with rage, this head filled with notes on what is wrong with the world or carrying a list of expendables or groceries a head…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave. It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other the same plus chestnut spots, drift above white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness to the situation, paralleling the stinks and…
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….
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