Poetry

As Written by Mikhail Bulgakov Little cartographer, little sparrow, little bathtub sitting upon clawed feet, little aquarium cracked and housing a dead crow, little anvil, little hones holding large sickles, little swan of the question mark neck choking on flakes of black snow, little water truck nose-down in a gully with a rusty tongue, a…

I Family is and is not a velveteen pillow theater a dinner hour mistake with candied yams on the side a box at the bottom of flightless penguins hitchhiking through town footprints in a cemetery II Symmetry two moon pies per gypsy greedy art and dirigible need rushes and reeds tracing paper on papyrus the…

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…

The moths in the orchard squeal with each pass of the mistral wind. Yet the reapers and their scythes, out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat in sure columns. Christ must have been made of shocks of wheat. When they lashed him, four bundles of fine yellow burst forth from each welt. And the women,…

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…

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…

How do you hold the dead when they’re hammered into a room so flat you can pick your teeth with one corner of the picture? When you were the one at that moment aiming the cheap camera at her wanting to fold her light into a square locket of time. You could see Noah’s Ark…

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…

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…