Poetry

  • Welcome Home

    In the nick of school busses. Office slacks. The rest of the game: Welcome Home, Girl. Critical objects to fragment and pony, sure—but I got this softshoe doublestep down. Books all memorized. You rolled some tardy & went fish-eyed in the cut: a tired, trifling air kiss bye-bye. But that’s the providence of maybe. The…

  • Tall Boys

    In Leeson Street? we find ourselves in a Georgian chapel of ease,? an elite mass rock, in an Irish lexicon,? in a credo unravelling, in ambivalent government attire, we stand, genuflect, stand again and disperse,? miming handshakes and the bluster of concern. What stains our hands— March as before whipped in a narrow light— as…

  • The Mollusk Museum

    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…

  • In My Reading

    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…

  • Waking Up During an Operation

    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…

  • At Midnight, On My Birthday

    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…