Poetry

Before it’s too late—neck-    Grope this life’s most beautiful Monsters until all of this disorder Shapes sacred. Until flocks    Of balloon animals—thousands Of them—drop from the diamond- Blue sky. Purple hippos & clownfish.    Ticks like hubcaps & backpack- Size wolves. A dancer will find A carved-in-butter replica    Of The Garden of Earthly Delights Sprawling the…

Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are two I’m certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoon by the shore just before September; and   You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for, all my life. When did remembering stop meaning to be lit from…

the barber’s best shears, Dona Rosa’s toucan, all the allamanda blossoms, the brown phantom and his white shadow. The cuckold never came home, but his pants basked on the courthouse roof for weeks. Hippolyta sank. The cemetery swelled. The original Christ above the church vanished along with the toothless nun. We found the demi-virgin strangled…

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center, my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend but will spend on a calm voice to tell me how I am to be…

This endless room is deep blue, dark red. I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouette but hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purple as my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the way the black-rooted starlets and reality queens drinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgraced congressman…

I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinking About the woman who got shot Fighting over that sweat-soaked Headscarf Teddy Pendergrass threw Into the crowd at one of those Shows he put on for “Ladies Only” the year I was born. How Many women reached Before the tallest two forgot Their new fingernails matched Purses and shoes?…

Between mud walls and the kiva wind off the mesa broke his phrases, as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windows melting into blowing snow and the ripped- off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white, we caught bites about the time of killing…

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow boots she minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little silly and wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she…

I loved to walk down to the café where she worked and stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noir halfway down the page. She’d come to my table with her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressed all in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell, strong and female, would enter me like…