Poetry

To the shadow house where the bees look like birds, and an ant’s death on the pavement hums the world beneath. Stamp on the silvery air. Ghosts buck back against their own pressure. What prods at the jaw there? A convergence of birds in a dripping glade? A string of gulls dragging in a hex?…

My mother was a Cinderella and a Cinderella never rescued by a godmother’s spell: part sophisticated lady; part hoary headed char-woman of bitter Texas winters whose ax could free the water frozen beneath the stock trough ice. In all kinds of weather, my brunette sister was a lonely, zaftig sweetheart. When first told one of…

Holding bread crust up to my lips, I watch a crow hop past its black feathered anchor into just a bit of atmosphere. My cat lunges into a rhododendron bush,   another January mouse pushed out of earth. Disemboweled, its whiskered head will be left behind like a misplaced chess piece or bodiless, a perfect…

To finally locate you after all these years and then— it’s in a dream!: you’re near the end in a hospital in a small New England city, what monstrous snake of a road led you here, where you sit on the bed making calls as you did, to the rich and famous, trying to raise…

J. M. W. Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead  and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” (1840) How it is That up is known Here, outstretched umber hands Punch through An ocean’s concave mirror                                     from Death’s inverse                                    Universe                             —But that’s Not in this view That Wasn’t me We say now To the flame-shaped…

What’s it like now to be shot in the foot by yourself, when you were aiming elsewhere and didn’t want   any kind of trouble? How else could you frustrate yourself more, what with your foot oozing blood,   and the gun smoke clouding the air so you can’t think, and that bird you wanted…

mistranslation after “Fellah” by Taha Muhammad Ali   You: Beethoven I mean to say: Mr. Beethoven I don’t get it: I spend the day removing obstacles, Me and all my neighbors, we’ve covered all the bases But behind our backs, on the phone, the sun still going up and down There are those who hurt…

    i. There are hands around a small neck. Climb in closer. Without line these your limbs, gills, wrist a small cut on a mid-season day. Now the squirrel arabesques limb to limb dropping      not falling.     ii. Gated all awake. Eaten all your conflagrated hate. Pulled down toward.    Pull down toward. This your cord….

By ten o’clock she’s cleaned the house and can measure bourbon into her cup. Who will save her now? No answer. The fetus flips and scoots inside her belly, then sleeps as quiet as the lamb that lies down with the wolf, its sovereign other. Improbably in that tiny Brooklyn apartment, Nina’s baby pulls cells…