The world resembles a phantom vessel destined to sail but never reach a port. The kidnapping victim bound to a sawmill tries to loosen the ropes in vain as electric sparks shower down, unsure if help is on the way. Later in life he will apprentice with a sailor and learn to pull apart every…
I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…
The dancer’s dying words: get my swan costume ready. No one stirs from her bed. Elsewhere a hollowed pharaoh lies with fingers and toes capped in golden thimbles as a sandstorm thickens outside. A human-headed bird evacuates his body by day and at night returns to nest in his emptied stomach. The purpose of mummification…
I. It came in like a quiet boat at night. We still don’t know who sent it or why. Some days it makes us shake. We kept on cooking for each other and bathing ourselves. We looked at children but the music of Chopin always replaced the sight of them. In its coming, it took…
Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…
After the second act blacks out, you head to the lobby, to feel the crowd stream around you, bearing secret energies, as through water heaves a sullen wave, as through the flag speaks a jubilance of wind. When you stop near a table of brochures, a fat, sunburned boy looks (instantly sizing you) up and…
When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…
Viareggio bus station, Italy He lifts him like they’re wrestlers in the ring or like in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus, only neither of these guys is a hero and both have been drinking all morning—this isn’t the Uffizi and what they’re doing isn’t in a painting: it’s a park, James Taylor’s going to sing tonight…
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…
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