Poetry

My Stab at Recruiting

The all volunteer unarmored drop-out meth-head accepting army, be all you can be dead here and slow or swifter in the sand, poor black white chicanas need jobs, who doesn’t like bread with their shrapnel in the morning, I feel a draft coming, a daft numbing of sense, can you dig it, your fox hole…

Three Abominations

It must be just bad translating, like Robot Chicken and Fly Head; but thoughts of the three— Walnut tumors? Moo shu pus? Fire-bombed baby with broccoli?—make my hunger high- tail it like Iron Man in a thunderstorm. The Pair of Love Shrimp moan syphilitically. Seafood Commissioner takes bribes to okay rancid clams. The Sauteed Happy…

Some Pacific Vapor

So you think you can bear me, now, do you? Carry my limp body through centuries Of sand (soft, made from ground shells, or souls As some have claimed), likewise, across that blue That is the paradise-never you deem We shall inhabit, in which I don cream And no clothes, or just a muslin dream-come-true…

Winter Trees

I am like the trees not ruined exactly but shorn of ornament and destitute of motivation it is possible to find both beauty and truth in their pure forms and I would like to do so in myself if time could be persuaded to hold off its heartless green

Eighteenth-Century Boisseau House

Virginia, after a WPA photo Leafless tree shadow scribbles its face and shadows of deflated bushes flood the yard, an arrogant silver squalor so riddled and clumped it seems a crowd had barged about, then despaired of raising a response from such a blank and pointless house. Bare weatherboard of equivocal color, snaggle-toothed shutters. The…

Drunk

When William Blake came fashionably late to parties he’d blame it on archangels, prophecies broadcast between the leaves of ordinary trees in the orchard: those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained… As in Martinsville, Wisconsin, when we allowed Mike Meinholz to get in the car, surely a mistake,…