Poetry

                            have you been the unwinged thing perched and testing the phone-wire’s teeter? Have you weighed the big Pro against the many feath’ry Cons? Have you watched the brows of standers-below as they fell into wish from honest worry? Sometimes the wind off the lake sounds like a siren approaching your rescue, instead of the air…

           I can turn the space of him over in my hands. See if it comesapart, if it’s permeable. Does it keep time, shrink, dissolve on flesh. Does it bounce. Can I back that thing up. Can I see if it stands, if it cutscorrectly. If it can clothe me.    If I can I swallow it.               …

I offer upthis flowerbox my skull dear whomeverlet its luxuriance exceed its basenesslet me curl in the blueblackroot hairs and wait for youwind in my teeth will sough sweetly

I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and     white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of     the road to the next village…

On a factory floor I felt for my keys. It was eight o’clock by the clock on the stall. (I meant to write wall) The tiles were one foot by one foot and sea foam green spoke the little shroud over the letters above the drill room door. Once it was useful to think of…

Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…

The duende got into my head by the back staircase, a gypsy girl-child dressed in red with an old man’s face. My bedroom turned bitter cold. There were banging noises, loud knockings in between the walls. Things left their places. My comb crawled across the bureau, clicking like castanets. My grandmother’s ivory-backed mirror cracked itself…

I’m a cipher. Before that, I was a loose cannon. Before that, I was a zealot. I preached on the street corners. I accosted strangers in subways to tell them I had good news for them. Before that, I worked on the assembly line in a fireworks factory. I stuck fuses in firecrackers and poured…

I have had just about all I can take of myself. —S. N. Behrman There’s a rose bush outside, like the one by the kitchen where Serena some evenings uncovered a pasta dish, beyond exquisite. My new wife and I would inhale its perfumes and sigh. Not like Adamo, her husband, who’d barely touch it….