Poetry

The two-person elevator that smells of pastries makes my lover so close joy in him is sealed into my childhood. Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountain’s aerial braids of water. Nights, letters leak through a shutter. Visiting my country I am always a stranger but distance is familiar and light. In this happiness…

Your beautiful pink asshole breathes when I breathe. All the words I want to say I want to say later. Let’s cheat on you with you. Is it possible to completely cover someone’s body with semen. Turn over and put your head on my stomach. You respond to every gurgle. You say we have pickles….

Fifty years ago my mother’s hands held this detective novel. She knew the world included secret passions, vile schemes, threats. Who killed Lili Godreau? The question should not be left unanswered! From Poitiers come two young detectives, Piéchard and Boivert, they are not stupid but they lack intuition. When a second murder happens they have…

It was time for me to go. I drank a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping Italian sodas, should have been home watching an old movie or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad. The woman sitting next to me calls…

Here is a tawny doe who chews a reed’s tip; behind the reeds, a lion whose red tongue droops. Yet in the doe’s prayer, the lion is a singing bird, and in the lion’s prayer, the doe is a flowering tree. And in the bird’s prayer, the tree that blooms incarnadine and evergreen, is our…

(script for ten voices) Light Rain: Plink, plink. Nothing counts for much. Pedestrians: We might go get a sandwich. Do we have time? Sure we do. We might go and buy a jacket. Life: I am long, I am long. For you I am long (even if not for a few who suffer weird disasters…

What he hated most about family Was the depth and the duration Of the emotion, the delimiting Nest, net, and trap of it all… Ours was not a poor family, Caught in that single word poor, But ours was an ascetic family, Caught in that one word. We had our dignity. We had Books and…

A gas flare throbs, an ignition Urged out from the interlacing steel. Over the refinery, it hovers, So long as pipelines rush raw oil Thrilling through A circulating need, so long As a man must be propelled Forward & his engine filled. The burning occupies the black air Like a moth transfixed— Still living, fluttering,…

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…