Poetry

Again, you are the church of what separates wrestling and professional wrestling. A little money, a lot of folding chairs. What separates knowing how to speak a language and knowing how to play an instrument is smaller than the difference between the blood on my shirt being mine or someone else’s. The French are allowed…

Watching it move up the valley in its plentitude between the mountains and me, the rain soaking into each particle of soil, glistening on the tip of each leaf, like the old myth of a god who sees our every thought and deed— impossible, but why not, if rain can do this? Rain: one thing…

A memorial erected over a void. Usually for a living person who just vanished, but whose death seems indisputable. Begin with a shovel, an empty rectangular cake of earth. Begin with a word, a grail to extinguish all hope. Begin with the story of a child disappearing between his fifth-grade class and the bus stop—baseball…

“Being Property Once Myself. I have a feeling for it …”—Lucille Clifton

I never saw my mother hold her husband’s hand           or stroke his blue-blazered shoulder. Compliments were reserved for thin women and           handsome priests. London and her last two houses brought brightness to her eyes.           Her greatest affection she saved for a succession of Scotties, a breed known to be aloof.           Each one she fed into…

There is nowhere for the wind to blow through the grass the way it blows through words to make them prayer. Not here. Not after harvest, just stems left, and seed pods, and leaves. All of it a wick as wide as there is landscape. Some farmers burn their fields, and the fire is a…

rockets and rocks, dingbats, all-nite coffee and gas-ups, flying saucers and neon Welcome to Los Vegas, starbursts and steel beams, bold upsweeps: a future. She wants to be atomic and glass, Hollywood and Jetsons, wants a future beyond this past constantly hardening in her path. Every time she makes someone stone, they monument, outlast her—…

arrived suddenly, left suddenly. In between, we stalked each other, omen to omen, panting. One of us bore a gold cuff around her neck. One of us sported black stockings. Each breath coated our chests in fear—anything could happen. Any second could turn on you, twist— uncatchable. Soon I faced nothing but crushed salvia, bent…

June 24, 2022 In the skyscraper hotel, in a conference room, in between sessions about news, I nod my head at the woman talking, act like I’m following. I’ve learned in a panel this week that: I am not listening. No one listens. One cannot listen. But I can see beyond this woman’s head to…