Poetry

  • Untitled

    A brick warehouse, a cold morning,and Newark in the distance. Bleakis how I take my coffee, insidea shipping container while a planecranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” somethingI’ve lost something a manwould feel right saying but which sitsunder my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take the bitter train throughNew Jersey but this…

  • Wild Through the Sea

    Remember the night it snowed               in a place we were told                               would never snow               and like two shadows cast by a lamp               standing in the presence                               of a Greater               we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid               the expanse of what                               I didn’t know endlessly               swallowing the floes the ocean has always been               immutable and dumb                               has always carried on               past my limitations…

  • Small Before-Church Poem

    Laughing at the thought of lackof pleasure as a pleasure—monuments not yet objects,a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen,considerable weeds and fallenpower lines to be here, I have moreto say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,like wanting the light my way. Towersdisappear…

  • The Forever Rachel

    The Forever Rachel chiseled into a tree and many years laterwritten in the water of a pond.Forever Rachel in her mesh hikers, steppingover a sleeping policeman.Hair under her arms. Hair on her legs.Wielding a picket sign every other day.She made her prom dress out of old newspapersand during graduation walkeddown the aisle barefoot forever Rachel,chuckling…

  • The Mirror

    Translated by Andrew Wachtel I walked ahead, there was no other path.Doors cut us off from the past: mama was aging,the tree burned up, and something was wrongwith the sick man’s chest.Everywhere I went a beggar woman followed,with a belly bloated like a globe,but she didn’t ask for cash or to sing a song.Like some kind…

  • Titration

    Bunsen burners click on, throats                closed for a safe flame. The roomtepefies—pipettes veiled in thin fog.                Litmus paper drops like sleeveson a dress. Every girl measures: reds,                blues, acid, acid, base. Someboys huddle around the fire, burn                the edge of our assignment, laughat how an eraser cooks in the blaze.                I’m tired of the slow…

  • Dead Zone (Solo 3.9)

    The case is now closed on the reasons behind the decision by the United Nations to officially terminate the existence of Israel as a living entity, an event that occurred about a century after it had voted for the partition of the Holy Land leading to the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. But…

  • Murmuration

    The bones of a daytime moonthen the shock of them across it: using their arms like wings,wheeling above Middleton Moor now as one body,now as many. They fly in wax jacketsand blue check shirts, plaid jumpers and high vis,magpie-black leather. Sometimes you might catcha bracelet falling like a feather, feel the plumage of a skirt,the…