Poetry

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…

I woke to a blizzard of franchising, burned quickly the money earned in a dress outlet in a strip mall. Mornings, I lugged the vacuum into the Versailles of the communal changing room. From my own image, a hundred versions regressed in the netherworld of underwear and slip, which is not so much confession as…

Everyone had heard of the great Loneliness but no one could be sure they had it, it’s impossible to talk about and comparisons are useless, like trying to judge butterflies by weight. You could be folding towels still warm from the dryer and suffering the Great Loneliness or suffering falling short of the Great Loneliness…

I woke in the middle of a wooded trailer park (in the middle of somebody’s lies), lying mired in a muddle about where I was, with nothing I could call my own: no shoes, no shirt, no pants, no socks, no job or occupation, income none. Wrecked mobile homes on either side hinted at ruin…

The lines the dead man writes are like the lobster’s skeleton Through which the wind blows, picking its way along the rocky shore, But make no sound. One hears only the grandeurs of the surf And the froth sliding down the glassy sand. One learns to live With this noise, which after all is beautiful…

Even before I had arrived on the scene, Whitman knew I would stand just where he stood on the edge of the East River watching the tidal flux and the swoop of gulls, and maybe you have stood there, too, among the barrels and the taut wires. But I would rather know— assuming you and…

Somebody’s alone in his head, somebody’s a kid, somebody’s arm’s getting twisted—a sandwich flies apart, tomatoes torn, white bread flung, then smeared with shit and handed back to eat—I dog dare you, I double dog dare you… Somebody’s watching little shit friends watch little shit him climb to the crown of a broken-down cherry tree…

The provinces of his body revolted. —W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” The histories are rife with various versions. Some of them cite those first covert incursions Of double agents turned far to the south And sent north to the land’s unwary mouth (As if it had a mouth), smuggling their goods…

According to the wisdom brewing at the seminar table, a poem that begins with petunias should find a way to get away from petunias. It should deviate from its path, break the flower-chain of content transcending botanical considerations altogether. But sometimes a poem shows no interest in executing a sudden turn, swerving off in some…