Poetry

A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the     cabin door. A tube top and…

In the morning my neighbor walks onto his deck and looks out, some days in a yellow jacket, some days in a raincoat, some days in a shirt. The house is far enough off I do not know his name, cannot quite see his face. I would not know him in line at the grocery….

The dark and heavy coat she always wore hid From her as much as anyone What grew her belly out one thought at a time. And she who did not know her body, Who was surprised to feel it Created with some boy she’d barely met, Ignored the word so much a shock She was…

don’t leave the tent delirious and starving in the blizzard makes more sense in hindsight through the howls of distant seals the ruined captain wanders off arctic exploration is no fun makes more sense in hindsight also don’t sleep with her or don’t take the red ones or don’t let the bees escape I took…

Dipped in the batter of the personal, adrift in its thick glisten, she gave up ambition and dyed her hair blond-on-black for her post-post-feminist project. Personal experiences are chains, balls, iron filings drawn fatally to the magnetic personality. Once she bore the leashes and tourniquets of the personal; stuffed herself deep into the nooses of…

Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder. Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea. This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells and the ocean, I’ll count my encounters with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, with the factory of liquid fold and…

after the Gawain poet Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it, swung and swept in the dark waters, driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks; the winds on the one water wrestled together. Without any touching of its teeth I tumbled into it and without more struggle than a…

Was I the last one waiting? Epochs passed, tides tossed the island twice each day, sometimes a lazy shushing, sometimes violent—then tides would frighten me, countdown clocks striking off the muzzy days and nights. Mosses grew around me—pin cushion, pale shield, old man’s beard. One gray day, walking on the sand, I found a wooden…

for Stanley Plumly Today, putting on my socks, I noticed, on my right foot, an ugly bunion and sore hammertoes. Overnight, it seemed, my alphabet of 26 bones, 100 ligaments, and 33 muscles had realigned themselves into the jumbled sentence of my mother’s right foot. How did my mother’s foot suddenly become part of me?…