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 namefrom the face of our supper club. The new owners slappeda 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 lottoward a greasy burger joint or he is on his deathbedand…

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

So thin, the life we had—sometimes I could see insidemy stomach and inside my sister’s the attacks startedwe were sitting in the corner of the living roomaway from the chandelier, my mom didn’t want usto sit under it when we were under attack my sister and I her doll and minethin and tight next to…

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 manI’m trying to singthe complicated song And I’m running out ofbreaththere are too many Changes in directionin this song—some parts Are just for the choirthey sound greatup above in their loft Then the men singand that’s surprising—the women Are tentativewhen they singbut sweet The song is mostly about Jesuswho…

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 couchthat 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 darkness…

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 hemof his orange loincloth to save Europefrom 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 shells.We might define…