Poetry

  • Tiger, Tiger

    A Fairytale Once upon a time a girl ran away to join the zoo.She was only herself in the company of animals.Their smell and their wordlessness drew her.Their silence was not a lack, but a better dimension. At the zoo was a tiger, untamed and deadly.She’d killed a keeper and only one man could manage…

  • In Defense of Darkness

    Drum-brush of fabric. The clink of a zip on laminate floor. You step from a skirt to the sound of our breathing. The street outside swells to a canticle of traffic. We’ve time to touch as if reunited— the harshness of the journey written into the depth of a clinch. Chest to chest, your head…

  • Quaaludes

    “Hey, Dude, try these” she whispered, the proffered palm, the pinpoint lights, dark stars. I did. Pines, a gravel strand. Frat boy canoodling with a coed. Some cool waif approached, said fog would afflict the Milwaukee reservoir, fed me the falsified warnings of high, incoming tides. One string of her turquoise bikini come untied. “Au…

  • In Praise of Flight

             Vous connaissez sans doute un voilier nommé “Désir.”                                                                         —Henri Laborit Like ruined churches in another snowthat lengthens everything to nightfall, even faith itself, that…

  • Annunciation in Gray and Black

    Night at the edge of the world, where nothing sings, except this mop-girl in her stonewashed coveralls, the silted airport gloom filming her hands like some ersatz account of sainthood. A prayer from her mother’s book, or a slum-town dance tune disappears into the pleats of fabric, when she bends into her work, unnoticed, which…

  • The Breathing

    Think back with a shovel, bend, do that. Who’s breathing through these tubes now? So this is how you plant trees in Scotland all afternoon. We take instruction. The translucence of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped over sapling after sapling sunk into earth, tied, staked…

  • The Script of Sleep

    The right words formed in my mind backlit by the hum of their origin yet even as they brightened into line I fell asleep inside them too tired to begin. If accident has design, then here it is— the gaps unfilled, no artifice. Is the door into the oak hard to find? No. It’s where…