Poetry

  • Gunshot

    The day before their wedding, Alfonso and Sonya beat drums in theCentral Square opening the puppet show. When the deaf boy, Petya,sneezes in the first row, one of the puppets, a police sergeant, col-lapses, its wooden ear in the snow. The puppet stands, and shakes hisnose at the audience.     An army jeep swerves around the corner…

  • 36

    How deeply I drink up home catalogs day—they shine open my diorama and teach meto lift my tiny arms to hang the dimeas a mirrory thing upon my shoebox wall. Here’s a sunshine page that reads,“A home expands via the wise use of mirrorswherever you wish for a window.”I’ve read it all, I’ve read, I’ve…

  • 35

    By candlelight the house went down.It’s no wonder the rats won’t come sleepin my newly rented corners…though to me a gatheringof low creatures would be a luminous, a concordant, a thing. Be slow to wish extinct the uglyrodent beasts. You can’t know when all that’s theirswill be more than yours, when a haystack of sleephuddled…

  • 34

    I knew better than to light light after light.I knew—I can’t recall to see candles outand could put the house down in burning—.What if someone asked me, then, do you want to receive its ashes? I’d say yes,that’s the right thing…(but deep down I’d say no,no ashes.). To imagine the size of the boxable to…

  • Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy

    I. at thirteen     for a whole dark seasonI was lethal with my pellet gun     murderingsmall things that wandered into yard     stalkingthe thin woods between our house & the highway—I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snakeI could track     if I had two surprised seconds to explain the meaning of my hands     my instinctswould have been…

  • Parable: Jackrabbit Belly

    Yesterday, jackrabbit belly was not a color. Today I hold a paint strip to the wall, and it’s true: this is the exact shade of a rabbit’s soft fur, of the sepia robe of St. Francis, whose followers swirled like birds, or were birds, St. Francis being one willing to trade like for like. An…

  • Surfacing

    Two women are walkingon the ocean floor   I’m the one in front, holding an oxygen maskthen passing it back to my mother We take turns  She breathesI breathe   She breathes   I breathe We can’t talk we just keep walkingand breathing and sometime towards morning I notice she’s gone    A bitof seaweed stirs in the shadows…

  • Ways to Harm a Thing

    Throw scissors at it.
Fill it with straw
and set it on fire, or set it
off for the colonies with only
some books and dinner-
plates and a stuffed bear
named Friend Bear for me
to lose in New Jersey.
Did I say me? Things
have been getting
less and less hypothetical
since I unhitched myself
from your bedpost. Everyone
I love is too modern
to be caught
grieving….