Poetry

Named after the Romantic poet who swam the Grand Canal, The bewildered surfer lives with his girl, his boy in a duplex by the shore. But the house isn’t a teepee in a field like where he grew To a state with his mother and father and sibs in northern forests Bewildered, though now he…

Presto! Vortices that come off birds from a passing shadow to a developing storm. As soon as light hits the water, they’re in the zone, low in the shallows, waiting out the night, the paralysis of the icy laws of fact. Amphibian between being, non-being, who does not know the number of his fingers? Or…

after Gwendolyn Brooks       I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…

There were helicopters in the earth and they rose and flew through the earth each morning they flew into our flowerpots our balconies As they circle over us, right next to us, their iron boxes with propellers shine Sonya sticks her fingers she’s putting her fingers she shovels her     fingers in my gums me to…

When you go to your favorite grocery store and this week’s Special is boneless pork tenderloin that you’ll roll in a floured paste with cracked pepper and rosemary before you roast it in a hot oven and serve it with homemade pear chutney do you visualize up to twenty wet pink piglets squirming out of…

Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops    and skin white enough to read by…

Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…

He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…

What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it’s everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own…