Poetry

When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legs turning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A man will come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleague at an office party, or a lifeguard on a…

Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallows of the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise…

Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex-    boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could    get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn,    romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line    waving paper…

I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb, like God snapping his fingers in my face: Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running around half-naked, with the rest of America, wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf. Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,…

Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in half and sent her father strolling across the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page…

Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was not speaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burst between his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slap the table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever…

At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggage into the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distance sometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admit I am often absent lately…

for Linda Gregg   Safe in the light along the bank Being in believing No name     Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing    On the brink Of the light    Blank    No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being Seeing Singing    Let my voice   …

“No Loitering” reads the sign by the school. But what about a school that offers courses In loitering as an art, each class designed To break another link in the argument That we ought to be somewhere else by nightfall, Ought to start now if we’re to arrive on time For the meeting of those…