Poetry

A mermaid crawls out of my mouth to meet you in this poem, my teacher who calls me teacher and therefore is my teacher, who shows me how to knot a net to make the moon rise during night watch on calm seas while the other sailors sleep. We are the ocean and our speaking…

In some corner of this desert plateau, native habitat to the partly run-over soda bottle, freckled with spilled antifreeze and pied patches of putrid something or other, a plastic bag is snagged like a tumbleweed in a perfect cube of hedge. At night, heat radiates off concrete like an exhale of relief in this legendary…

1  God’s image was in the mirror and God’s image was my grief. And lo, I knew I was not loved by Him and wept. And I knew shame. For though I was young, I was not young enough to weep in the face of the Lord who made me. 2  In sorrow, I set…

When you’re sixteen with pristine nipples it’s hard to imagine you’ll go a little bit blind one morning years later trying to read a bottle, but in point of fact you’ll be standing in the shower in early fall in Maine at the age of 43, the water will be brisk and zesty, and though…

The two-person elevator that smells of pastries makes my lover so close joy in him is sealed into my childhood. Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountain’s aerial braids of water. Nights, letters leak through a shutter. Visiting my country I am always a stranger but distance is familiar and light. In this happiness…

Your beautiful pink asshole breathes when I breathe. All the words I want to say I want to say later. Let’s cheat on you with you. Is it possible to completely cover someone’s body with semen. Turn over and put your head on my stomach. You respond to every gurgle. You say we have pickles….

Fifty years ago my mother’s hands held this detective novel. She knew the world included secret passions, vile schemes, threats. Who killed Lili Godreau? The question should not be left unanswered! From Poitiers come two young detectives, Piéchard and Boivert, they are not stupid but they lack intuition. When a second murder happens they have…

It was time for me to go. I drank a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping Italian sodas, should have been home watching an old movie or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad. The woman sitting next to me calls…

Here is a tawny doe who chews a reed’s tip; behind the reeds, a lion whose red tongue droops. Yet in the doe’s prayer, the lion is a singing bird, and in the lion’s prayer, the doe is a flowering tree. And in the bird’s prayer, the tree that blooms incarnadine and evergreen, is our…