Poetry

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…

First just a few, then more, then more— this one a gift, this one a pity adoption. They flutter as she passes. They call when she comes home. She strokes them, soothes them. They flap, agitated. She tries to nap, but their cries are constant. They are starving. They will not be placated. She says…

Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a…

“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…