Poetry

After Pablo Neruda   This piranha in your poem, this river-missile drawn to flesh I once dangled from a fishing line. I know you won’t believe me, but when I held its flapping body to my ear, it moaned. The piranha moaned, like the medicine man moans of a river he believes is an anaconda,…

For every forest, there is a pig screaming out like a child as the butcher’s knife pops open its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood, a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydrate a spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggy sign on a country road, a teenager exhales pot smoke into a pillow in her parents’…

In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…

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?…