Poetry

Toss

Every year they come together like the risen sap of bamboo,? cross cut canes pitch and toss,? all the families waving, in the white laden branches of the pear trees. Hives that once sang like choirs lie against the gable walls? of their churches and schools, tossed in the dust of quarantine,? old tea chests,…

Octopus

There is nothing for her to hold and everybody knows it. Nothing for her to hold, eight times over. Pieces of her babies, girly, ghostly, float toward her nightly tossing brain. Mom has a gene for dropping dead, but she won’t use it on her misery. God of Anthony, god of the thin good men…

An Old Boyne Fish Barn

You should have seen the sea in those days, wind smoke and weeping flares washing ashore from the barrios, all those hesitant evacuees, as tarpaulin stretched along Beaufort’s Dyke and our drift nets sailed through the Hebrides. Shuffling in pipe smoke, scribbling a plume of grave longing on the bones of a wax-bright dusk, I…

Sunflower

Wind takes your hair like a hooligan owl and leaves a deep pocket of dusk in your scalp. Love without pride is a love with no end. You keep calling me in to fill up your head, but the mutinous dust of the dead yellow field says better not listen to a thing with a…

Memoire

It seems farfetched, I know, but when we tethered toy horses in the lea of the patio the moon wept like a candle, and the dawn when it came crept along the dusty panhandle. Best not to worry the truth like that yarn about Turner strapped to the mast of the little ice age, better…

Diabetic

To imagine the sweetness pushing through my veins like grains of glass scarring a beach when the tide sweeps in. To prick my finger and squeeze a drop of blood, angel rich, earth heavy, onto a test strip. To wait for the meter as it counts, and stare past the little black numbers all the…

After Riefenstahl

The screen’s fabrications remain. A film shot never fails, sailing through the century like a black v at the hour of moaning. I premiere these pontifical birds: villagers march and raise their arms, Marschlieder. Thus I am your sweet messenger glittering more than first stars, a harvest of light concealing your nicks and little deaths….

It’s a Dream Wherein–Finally, and by That I Mean Right Away, Which Is to Say, Just in Time–I Understand Circular Breathing

      It’s my first class in the infra-tactile studies program it meets in the Incunabula Collection of the Bancroft it’s Nate Mackey’s class    Professor Mackey is young       wears jeans and Professor Mackey wears a brown leather belt    a big, oval silver buckle with inlaid blossoms       the heels of…

Bitch Tree

I was sitting on the bitch tree, smirky and small. Just me to myself with my hats on, a tulle dress eating pomegranates, throwing seeds, as the sun rose and fell into my body’s mouth. There were no boo hoos but murmurs and people far below grew distant. Money fell out of the tree, honey…