Poetry

Presto! Vortices that come off birds from a passing shadow to a developing storm. As soon as light hits the water, they’re in the zone, low in the shallows, waiting out the night, the paralysis of the icy laws of fact. Amphibian between being, non-being, who does not know the number of his fingers? Or…

What else to do with sorrow but to buy her a drink, walk it over to her table, set it down in front of her (Sorrow is a woman, always has been, always will), and say the only pick-up line you’ve ever heard that works, “Drink this until I start to look handsome.” And she’ll…

We interfere with what we know by knowing it. We interfere with what we do by doing it. We interfere with what we love by loving it. I guess you could say we’re the causes of our own loneliness. We interfere with what we watch by watching it. We interfere with what we write by…

It’s been over a year since he was last seen near the park’s boathouse, where birdwatchers congregate for coffee and small children lob oversized chunks of stale bread at the ducks, igniting and re-igniting their squabble. Fluorescent flyers–Missing husband and father of two, 40 years old, seizure disorder— have been replaced with more recent sightings;…

There were helicopters in the earth and they rose and flew through the earth each morning they flew into our flowerpots our balconies As they circle over us, right next to us, their iron boxes with propellers shine Sonya sticks her fingers she’s putting her fingers she shovels her     fingers in my gums me to…

When you go to your favorite grocery store and this week’s Special is boneless pork tenderloin that you’ll roll in a floured paste with cracked pepper and rosemary before you roast it in a hot oven and serve it with homemade pear chutney do you visualize up to twenty wet pink piglets squirming out of…

Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops    and skin white enough to read by…

Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…

He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…