Poetry

  • Sweet Nothings

    After gimlets and cosmopolitans, we’re on to sex and its catastrophes, Susan telling about the time she ordered a paycheck’s worth of Italian lingerie. She dressed slowly, she says, feeling only a little ridiculous as she slid one gartered leg across the coffee table. Looking up, her husband asked if she could stop blocking the…

  • Hotel Razing

    Snow falls the tenants gather at the corner Gone are their small poor lives we envy in The lyrical vein the snow falls as thick As soap over the monuments over The benches and the scratched branches the pile Of tires in the median strip the snow Falls like excess paperwork on the street- Lamps…

  • After Aristophanes: take a twig

    push up the wick, when the dark comes early. That’s marrow dark. Waiting-for-the-savior dark. Keep spare lamps for when cocoons turn mute: their prophecy spilled scale & tattered wing. For when no wasp will overwinter & no beetle. When that iridescence litters fields lace tight your goods. Somewhere in the barn a cache: broken bottle,…

  • a bouquet of violence

    black-eyed susans sound abused, as if the night beats flowers up and needs help loving as people love who sign letters xoxoxoxo, which reminds me of football coaches showing massive men how to destroy massiver men on a chalkboard at halftime. if you are a flute thrown out a window on the way to montgomery,…

  • Doorway

    He goes out the door as someone I don’t know. Not the boy-man I was at 17 but somewhat lagging behind, somewhat further ahead, dressed carefully for others in red and black, his body a deliberate mystery. No idea what he knows, what he says, what he does. I’m not supposed to know, only the…

  • Aubade shaped like breasts or arrows

    Mistgreen maple leaves just twenty feet from my looking, my remembering                          an equally soft morning                          in Monterosso, woman with left hand                                               in sea, right hand                                               cupping a baby’s head                                                               to breast, how feminine                                                               it seems, the support, this mist                                               rounding sharpness                                               from bird chatter, this wombing of fence, of farm, of distance inviting me to…

  • Fassbinder

    He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…

  • Tree of life

    There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…