Poetry

“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…

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…

After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…