Poetry

In My Reading

If there is such a thing anymore? as a humble servant in the vineyard this is he, a man from the coast home on his lunch break working the stooped enclosure below me as I read and revel in the feral words of murder on what passes for a roof garden with a view of…

Waking Up During an Operation

They seem disappointed in you, these faceless women, these shrinking enlargements standing around you, some turning away from the eye you can see through. You want to be open about all this, but what’s left of your mouth won’t say so, and what’s right can’t say anything good or bad. You wonder where you’ve been…

At Midnight, On My Birthday

My mother, dead at my age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering my house requires a ticket. For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over. She’s dreamed my body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, my breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper…

All That Time

I’d like, about now, a little small talk, the grown-up kind between long agons some summer afternoon across a table, when what’s not said is not evasion but another language, every empty word and nodded half-sentence a hand laid on the arm. Such sweetness, all that time, you around me, like the rain in the…

His Brazen Hair

I was looking at the Brian Bourke exhibition in the Fairgreen Gallery.? Outside, a man lay collapsed on the ground. It was freaking people out? they kept coming in telling the person? at the desk about the man on the ground. After a while the guards came, they were wearing blue gloves.? They knew the…

Trans-Siberia

Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Every ball is a bloody, beautiful mask of powerful people. We make up pretzels. I always did like chickens. O, slender fez, mildew perching on its fur. The poet is an oafish celeb on a hood. Of every wondrous power. On a hood. I glance…

Harbinger

At the moment the dog dies some last good leaves your body, Omen. Oh, you, woman without mother, father, lover, this dog with his final sweet breath snout. Harbinger, oh, you: lay thee down in the bracken & brush. In a morning beyond tomorrow morning, by some strength not fully your own, drag yourself to…