Poetry

If I get religious for a minute, it will be to keep termswith the bewildered caul of being thirteen, surrounded by the dead. What used topeek through the roof, never so much stroking string things and eating afterlifebiscuits, as making sound like a wonky piano dragging its broken leg in an interminable circleof Sundays. I…

after Issa I think it’s enough just to sit and meditate, heedlessof the needs of others close to us and oftheir perpetual demands that seem to sap thestrength from us. My doorway and the morning deware all I need to make my day, and thatis where I’ll plan to be. And if that marksme misanthropic,…

The sky was low. His head was a vase ofsorrows he wanted to fill with blossoms.He stepped into the House of Wigs. The saleslady said, “Try this one on. It’s calledthe Mind of Fire. It turns ashes into flame.Prometheus was wearing it, they say, whenhe was punished by the Gods for his compassionand he barely…

And shall we describe the beautiful bike?It was a beautiful color the beautiful bike.What ever happened to the beautiful bike?The beautiful bike rode off into the beautiful sunset.Not by itself, surely. Who was pedaling the beautiful bike?You, you were the one pedaling the beautiful bikelast seen disappearing into the beautiful sunset. Now I remember the…

This practical kid, bornCapricorn, actuary of the stars, he’s planning my death,sure of the thermodynamic heaven he’s invented. Because energymust go somewhere in this system, in his I’ll be repurposed as a tree.And this comforts me, as no discount coupons for paradise ever could.Finally fitting, I’ll meet my zero as the absolute, container of soot…

O tulip, tulip, you bloom all day and later sway a deep-waisted limbo above the dinner table, waiting for a coin to drop into your well,for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel. Soon, on ocean winds, dawn cries its devotion, our world entranced once more into being.Let go your sumptuous rage, darling.All…

1. Know your origin: you are a tokenof the afterwards of love. What flinchesin the ribbon of your utterly new bloodis nothing but the echo of a bed post—pulse.             You have grown up. From filamentwithin your mother’s bulb, you have evolvedinto a chandelier of bones, weightlesslyorbiting your portion of the womb, aglowin skin that holds you…

All winter the ghosts were waitingfor a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so youwere roped in. February had the year on pause, the dayslike holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You hadno knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teachthe dead from a colorful textbook,…

to Sleep I’ll count backward from a thousandtill my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivelin a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight.Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping skyto slip behind the throbbing canopy of hide I…