Poetry

Pretend a boom box blasts over your shoulder. Raise your hands in the air. Twist them as if picking mangoes. Look to the right as if crossing streets. Look to the left, slowly as if balancing orange baskets. Bend as if picking cotton. Do the rump. Straighten up as if dropping firewood. Rake, do the…

watched a crew wipe the family name from the face of our supper club. The new owners slapped a cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him, either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lot toward a greasy burger joint or he…

Blackbird called Redwinged                                              and I both startle when I stand and turn. Bird expertly                        swerves, flies on; but I spend a few…

So thin, the life we had— sometimes I could see inside my stomach and inside my sister’s the attacks started we were sitting in the corner of the living room away from the chandelier, my mom didn’t want us to sit under it when we were under attack my sister and I her doll and…

This undistinguished        shingled        condominium is closer to Route Six than to the sea so that muffled sound we hear is cars, not waves. The occupants of the adjacent unit are often in the driveway keyboarding in cars. No one is keyboarding, of course, at dawn when I leave for the beach so I can beat…

At the funeral for the young man I’m trying to sing the complicated song And I’m running out of breath there are too many Changes in direction in this song— some parts Are just for the choir they sound great up above in their loft Then the men sing and that’s surprising— the women Are…

Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couch that your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the…

Reminds me of early winter—field dressed, dangling from a porch girder like an upside-down garland of roses, no longer animal or drifting hole in a snow-blazed moor. How is it the body knows it deserves the ground before the clouds? The noose almost giving in? Suddenly thawed, dropped in its own shadow, held: un-mothered, sucked…

El Negro de Banyoles tugged the hem of his orange loincloth to save Europe from shame. Storm clouds darkened the gallery skylights. Bruegel’s blind man led a parade of blind men into a ditch as a student sketched a copy at her easel. After the war, Vietnamese beat cradles, tools, and kettles from spent artillery…