Poetry

It must be just bad translating, like Robot Chicken and Fly Head; but thoughts of the three— Walnut tumors? Moo shu pus? Fire-bombed baby with broccoli?—make my hunger high- tail it like Iron Man in a thunderstorm. The Pair of Love Shrimp moan syphilitically. Seafood Commissioner takes bribes to okay rancid clams. The Sauteed Happy…

So you think you can bear me, now, do you? Carry my limp body through centuries Of sand (soft, made from ground shells, or souls As some have claimed), likewise, across that blue That is the paradise-never you deem We shall inhabit, in which I don cream And no clothes, or just a muslin dream-come-true…

I am like the trees not ruined exactly but shorn of ornament and destitute of motivation it is possible to find both beauty and truth in their pure forms and I would like to do so in myself if time could be persuaded to hold off its heartless green

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…

If you’re a pig from Ohio, all muscle and gristle, not knowing they’re planning to rend you into bacon, what better place to find a wallow than this blue-black mud where you can keep yourself cool as you wait for David from Williamsfield, Ohio, Sergeant in the Army’s 4th Infantry— two thousand- six-hundred-fifty-seventh casualty whose…

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs…