Poetry

Nicole has this one friend whose hand can burn straight through her clothes & through the skin of her back. Like this, she said, placing her hand on my winter coat, the train above the East River, stalled. Like this, the canary blossoms of Chinese witch hazel flame into this world as astronomers believe dark…

At dark, I make a homesick says a Japanese exchange student in my wife’s ESL class, writing how much he misses his family, his girlfriend, a certain café in Kyoto. I suggest tutoring. But that night, it feels strangely fitting after our second bottle of wine to cap the red pen bleeding cursive from her…

Think of a lizard as a spot of day-glo green, insect-sized, though in all ways perfect. Lost in this kitchen of chrome-souled recipes for oblivion, he looks hard at me. His skin, my skin, our heartbeats tight with trauma, I carry him out where, tack-sharp, two green push-ups, and a cool survey of the universe,…

Beside the cash register in my favorite used bookstore I see a glass bowl of what seem to be postage stamps until I look closer: temporary tattoos of red and green,  with ornate black lettering Bruised Apple Books. Take one, says Andrew, Take two, as if he directs a film about the struggle of an…

Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…

The riddle of the garden is the garden. The hollyhocks, chest-high, their irresponsible profligacy. The nethering stonecrop. The wax in which the body walks. The fragrance kneeling at the lily’s mouth. The story that is the lily, the fragrance; the peonies, their exfoliate hives. The weavers in their close huts of wattle hurl questions at…

Looming over the little sewing kit and the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner, I am a giant— a king standing before the royal mirror in an enormous robe of terrycloth. As a sign of my benevolence, I will forego coffee from room service and check out early before my tiny subjects arrive to wash…

There are some things I should tell you beforehand: I was born on a bed covered quickly with a quilt. I stepped my bare feet into the new world of a lamp-lit room in the country. Because of a broken driveshaft we stayed, my mother and I, among the witch-hazel straddled houses and the buzzard-heavy…

Pascagoula, Mississippi Do Not Enter the green stucco school, cyclone fence studded with debris and memorial wreaths, monkey bars shadowing blacktop where hopscotch, four square still scrawl yellow. Do Not Touch the dodge ball under the crepe myrtle tree or the waterline ringing the building, boarded windows eyes shut tight against the flood. Do Not…