Poetry

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s ever met, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.)   I said     I’m dead you put blankets on my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’re always cold    Dead I said again   you said…

What a name to call your sister—Nada: Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish, where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds of the way to Nathalie where, in French, the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth, the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the word contagious, even Mom fizzing laughter…

as the voice inside the telephone made crying sounds or allergy sounds. It was that time of year—       the particle count high and already a shortage of rental cars and we were all desperate to vacate the premises while you had already done so.             Standing between the voice and my self at the center of…

If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head away, if death is turning away, with long brown human hair, revolving like a…

Dear, neither of us has any money. Let’s say we leave that field open, as in we don’t complete the form. I see nothing here says it is required. Maybe this is the other kind of field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me. Dear, neither of us has any money. Let’s say there’s an…

the horses are filthy in their winter coats grubby and matted manes mended with hay they flicker between snows like medieval orders of spiritual pilgrims; seen and invisible— unseen and real the blizzard continues and the world is the wind your eyes close to slits inside the drift and howl the horses aren’t yours /…

It’s not the shore; it’s the ocean that opens. Devil, make a mountain of me for the water to dwell         against. I became aware of my       methods and the methods changed me. Soldier, you make my body a map on the floor. It’s what the door is for—         hesitation—a hand that wants to be a…

Suspect enthusiasm— having eaten pins before— but that’s what keeps one quiet, that’s what makes one stay. Empty is just the first temporal name after something smaller sat there is gone. Then that space regains its height and wild. Let let lovers be light thoughts, just touch remembered in some not unkind way. It was…

When we looked at the circle, we felt powerless. Earth or fist our hands are bound together    in protest. Bare my throat, I said, in a faceful of sand. I swallowed too much water. The property    is private, the way we’ve come to think of grief as nonviolence, absence,    lack, fasting as an act of…