May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…
I remember when I was four a book seemed from heaven and then, when I was eight, it seemed a field. * How large the world has become, the thoughts, capable. I wanted to look at that, just that. * I thought I would never speak again. But there are books, transformed, and souls that…
I was thinking about why souls have bodies, what can a body do that a soul can’t, and about the Amish or Mennonites, the ones whose children were so sick with the same disease that struck generation after generation, until finally one doctor figured out how to help them. But while he was figuring, he…
Music is one of the first things to go in the general condition of being out of it– you know that when you’re behind the old broadcaster on line at the liquor store and her ringer is a happy snatch of a song that sounds like cutoffs around a keg in Happy Valley, PA, home…
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…
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