Poetry

Where will you go?   Will there be a nail brush, face cream, a cotton-pressed comb? Will there be toothpicks? Dove soap? A small towel? Will there be a shoe horn? Will you sleep? Will there be others? Will there be a quiet room, a firm bed? Will you lie prone with your hands on…

Will I always love you for throwing that skate out of Alan’s boat? Last summer, out lobstering in his Black Fin off Gay Head, only four bloody bluefish left for bait and five more traps to fill, we begged for its life. Did I know then I would leave you after fourteen years? Playfully patriarchal,…

Spackling the golden clouds in a fucking frenzy. I wear my hair mad as a rocket scientist that helpless one morning. Ill, doctor says, & she won’t live years. Did you ever run from your own sick heart choking? What the night knows in the myth of its far lightless pit could lay you flat…

In the end, the end seems probable, but before come many votes and murders.   The common redstart votes for its own splendor among the other splendid things;   the virgin murders her own abashed vocabulary, pretending to a toughness she does not as yet possess.   Possess she will, in time, a rude demeanor…

I felt it when they hammered out these feet and carved     the flesh between these long toes of mine and when they rubbed narrow the stalks of my legs     into calves and thighs—yes then and when they shaped my groin outward instead of in     and rounded my ass same as everyone’s yes—then…

If it isn’t a disappointment it’s an overwhelming number of coincidences. Because really I don’t need   another you another pigeon like you, I will tell them. You are at the same time an embraceable construction and of Kansan descent.   Nouns and nouns and metal and nouns and you might suffer the weather but…

This is the small hill Landscape of the middle country I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels This is the last evening No light in the squandered wood The gentleman farmer still awake His back to my back   Verdant in blackness is a twinkling Is a wet streamlike thing…

—ágnes nemes nagy every few minutes, through a metal flue the throat bursts into flames from the furnace above my bed. it’s the color of fire. i can see the chokeholds catch. fire ants carry off the heat down the metal ducts, and the vents push out the heat, which falls down the walls behind…

She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house.   She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark   and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…