Poetry

  • Bare Trees

    They are big fans of horror film.In the fading light of a November afternoon,The gray surface of a pondLooks like a movie screen to them. The moving branches reflected in itAre like the fingers of the blindGroping to touch the face of someoneWho’s been calling out to them In the voice of geese flying overhead,The…

  • Writing

    There are feelings I would rather not have, so I avoid certain types of texts and images— particularly pornography. Sometimes I think this makes me a better person, but, in actuality, it also makes me a coward. Am I so afraid I’ll enjoy some ridiculously sexist fantasy? I’m not sure what I’d do with the…

  • The Interment

    The graveside prayers and eulogies over,A stray dog came to bark at us among the headstonesAs we trooped back over a hill watchingThe wind lift the widow’s skirt higher and higher,While the undertaker ran after us,Waving an umbrella someone had left behind. We couldn’t help but think of our friendLying red-faced in his pricey new…

  • What Is Left Here

    Out in the open, there is a cowshed. There are the expected gaps and hornets. Here lives our story, where we used to meet— You smelled like hay, were always listening to some other sound, the buzzing of your own ideas chasing us down. You began building a staircase out of thorny branches, then a…

  • Law

    Growing up, there were always two laws.My mother, the greater, the greatestWho made enemies if necessary outOf the trashman or the paperboy.Queen without her court and details,Commands so precise, you could notFollow if you were not one of her students;If you did not know her nobility you mightThink she was crazy in her house dressStanding…

  • After

    When the sun broke up the thunderheads, and dissonance was consigned to its proper place, the world was at once foreign and known to me, that was shame leaving the body. I had lived my life from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Wet and glistening, twisting…

  • Middle Distance

    In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart’s disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer: another day’s delay before you are nowhere— for death fixes all distances                             like a new nail.

  • Souvenir

    Thirty-six years till my mother is bornThe perfumes she worewhen she was young    whatever happened The bottom of her jewelry drawercalls and calls as I run her through her first school playShe doesn’t understand Stroke my stomach    mother    till I understand Why is the movie too advanced?Why do we have to stay home and chase…

  • The Calling

    Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees, I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered not so much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled rasp of his breathing and it pushes and draws me…