Poetry

History Is a Room

The study of History is the study of Empire. —Niall Ferguson  I cannot enter. To enter that room, I would need to be a man who makes History, not a girl to whom History happened. Mother to two daughters, I guard their lives with hope, a pinch of salt I throw over my shoulder. To…

Paradise

That story I told you about suffering Was a lie. I never wandered into The woods with a pack of matches. Truth is I was born there, and there I ran the weather. Deer left Apples in my hand, so I didn’t think To cook the deer. The secret of my Life was my life,…

Unkneeled Prayer of Gratitude

You’ve given me some hairy forearms, God, and a dark patch on this heaving chest. And, now, I have written my screenplay, eaten the buttered meat of the calabaza with my children. Smiled at a stranger for no goddamn good reason. Blasphemed. Not like Job; I’m reductive, a snot blower, piss-stained this morning, underweared, I…

Pigeon

A chef cuts off your coo, your iridescent neck, eases a small planet from your belly. Once wings and lift, you lie beneath a pinch of black pepper, onion, feel yourself brushed with butter, browned; sense yourself inside an oven: its intimate sky. Your brain was once a compass housed in a binnacle; your beak,…

In Line

Somewhere between here and Louisiana, I changed Pants. The money I carried, each quarter I counted And counted on is missing. Men and women bear Kegs and cartons, bananas and eggs. I need Sugar, some smokes, a single can of coke To get through the margins where I write, Metaphor=tenor+vehicle for children who beg To…

Trees as Soldiers March

Pity the soul for its rotten luck For not being plucked ripe from the air. Whole days spent in cars. I want to wrap the trees like Christo, Invent a salve for the illnesses of my affections. All is silent here. What the fortune-teller Imparted is enveloped in another language. How I struggle just to…

2) St. Augustine: If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.

Prince calls it little because he imagines a woman’s body waist up, the rest Corvette, which is French for a sort of girlie warship, a chimerical twist on the Freudian cockpit. Who wouldn’t want a belly button for a windshield? All us baby ball turret gunners would submit to mother love as long as we…

Video Shoot

Hard in the barrel, liquid in the hunter’s palm, in the temples of deer eating onion in the lowest section of the dell; a stone’s saddle of holly; a cardinal. If the camera is a gun girls in tiny nothing crash to the bedroom’s bear rug. Courvoisier splashes their made-to-pop, powdered eyes. The girls are…

Creationism

I gave the bathtub purity and honor, and the sky noctilucent clouds, and the kingfisher her implacable devotees. I gave salt & pepper the table, and the fist its wish for bloom, and the net its knotholes of emptiness. I gave the loaf its slope of integrity, the countertop belief in the horizon, and mud…