Poetry

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

His plane was scarcely more than canvas stretched across board. Gunned down by a German Fokker onto no-man’s land, my father crawled under cross-fire to a crater and sprawled in on the dead. Only once did he mention the maggots and stench in a world that slammed up too soon. That night, between the sizzle…

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…

And the craft that createth a semblance —Morris, “Sigurd the Volsung” (1876) I think about a tiger. Twilight exalts The vast and never-resting library And seems to make the shelves of books recede; Powerful, innocent, new-made, stained with blood, He will move through his rainforest and morning, Will leave his spoor upon the muddy bank…

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…

Had he been able to sing… It was almost a song. The phrases enveloped in his voice’s flesh Were of the hardness of a writing near at hand. He would note: the kernel. The stone On which he constructs a temple of music. A school of gongs. How to hold the earth in place. Which…

Dearest, I am happy in the fire. The lighting is spectacular, snaking tongues, a rain of sparks, and the moans of the damned thrill me. There is no death here. God’s love revives us at the brink of extinction. The torments are cunningly varied but there is not one that does not correspond to a…

Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness but no one could be sure they had it, it’s impossible to talk about and comparisons are useless, like trying to judge butterflies by weight. You could be folding towels still warm from the dryer and suffering the Great Loneliness or suffering falling short of the Great Loneliness…

I woke in the middle of a wooded trailer park (in the middle of somebody’s lies), lying mired in a muddle about where I was, with nothing I could call my own: no shoes, no shirt, no pants, no socks, no job or occupation, income none. Wrecked mobile homes on either side hinted at ruin…