Poetry

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Left of the @ sign the e-mail address was ethnically gendered with the nonce noun sistah, which, I have to confess, I scoffed at, thinking it was from some self- discovering student of mine, before realizing it was my aunt who sent the jpeg from her cell phone. My aunt who doesn’t mind a bit…

Maybe nothing is meant to be seen so, but when I saw your mouth, your mouth alone, neither in sleep nor silenced by thought, fear, astonishment at our selves, for we were alone, at last, in bed, not far from sleep, I thought I saw the consequence of things, the having to prevail over the…

           Coppélia What does it mean? What can it mean? A man so lonely he goes mad and builds a girl furnished with everything, and yes, I mean everything. Just look: right down to the curl of our disputed provinces, she’s my twin, Alsace to my Lorraine, no blood but oil for beaus who blanch, or…