Poetry

Here, take it, my mother would say, unwinding a scarf from her neck, slipping off a bracelet, a ring too small for my finger she tried to force anyway. A giver, a couldn’t-hold- on-to-it, my mother was. She would give you, as they say, the shirt off her back—and ours. My father’s three-piece suit and…

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…

Coming to scrub the fourth corner, chip loose paint off cement stuck with old stones, I wonder who wrote in pencil ace, yummy!—and why? Yesterday, pushing a broom into the struts under the stairs, I clinked on an old bottle of bath oil, labeled in deco style. Thirty years in this house. I’ve touched the…

A Godly life would be the best, If it could be lived, so would Eden, If we had stayed there. Meanwhile we can choose a Godly life. For Eden is still burning, And the air scorches our lungs, Our tongues, our young, and yet, Another Eden remains a possibility. To live for others, To pray…

The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a…

“It seems to be the five stages of yeast, not grief, you like to write about,” my son says, meaning that bread is always rising and falling, being broken and eaten, in my poems. And though he is only half serious, I want to say to him “bread rising in the bowl is like breath…

White-haired, stolid madonna wrapped in shawls crocheted by hand, waits stately in the chair, hands folded, and seems to stare straight through the walls. Perhaps she looks because she finds things there, inside the bumps and grooves of textured paint: Poland, husband, country house, the air draping the mountain in the summer, faint with the…

Let the watchers admit to the terror of being young, and the writers set down on blackboards their fear. It is the people’s right to ask exile or blood, the people’s privilege to eat the cheapest food. While the talk of guns worms into the dreams of the citizens, every schoolyard is the same. Salomé…

The new guy bought it as a present for his wife (this a story Jim is telling)— like a love swing like I think of as a love swing? Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn. So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch, the dimpling in his wife’s thighs, though when I…