Poetry

                     You will grow up to be a restless man with cold hands                      and a hard-to-reach heart                the gypsy woman told me                            as she opened my palm. I was seventeen then, my hands unmapped,                            my heart as inaccessible as Tibet.          A soap opera played soundlessly on the TV                in…

Ham sandwich, food poisoning, own vomit. Plane crash. Car crash, motorcycle crash, bicycle crash. Slit wrists. Suicide by shotgun blast, suicide by hanging. Carbon monoxide poisoning, leap from hotel window, leap in front of subway train. Natural causes. Overdose of pills. Heart disease. Double suicide with mother. Brain tumor, defenestration, erotic asphyxiation. Victim of hit…

Our father wanted to climb Mount Moriah and we refused to go unless it was understood we were going against our will— unless we could climb by suffering, dragging ourselves step by step through the boxwood glade, withheld birch, glinting ash, oak bent to the will of the south wind— that was our secret, denial,…

after Cavafy   Flickering above the pink rosettes and your name iced in ivory buttercream, a bouquet burns on top of your cake, fifty blossoms of flame. One candle equals a year of your life, plus one more to wish on. Hurry, make a wish, blow them out! They’re out. Now cut the cake. But…

Ach—the gravitas of the hunt. I. Digestive turned blue so the woman said. Said, I write my own islands, and red, red. Was urinary.            Under the astigmatic lens of her naked eye she followed the tracts. Looking at worms for a long time she said A worm in its lifetime moves short distances. She knew…

Some name them knees, those roots of the cypress trees in that murky swamp, rising up out of the water, though their legs beneath them, the feet, the toes, even the bodies down there at the mud’s bottom still haven’t shown up yet. So far, it’s only those bold knees that point the way. Some…

Swallows, phoebes, flycatchers, chickadees, warblers, and some terns and sparrows are less than an ounce, and are so little of water, more hollow than bone, though of substance in boughs and leaves, where they perch and fly, for how little they want of what matters, bright and unmistakable—aspiring, disappearing—not of who they are but of…

Stoned in the canned jangle of steel drum tunes in the faux Tiki bar, I sit below dusty plastic fronds and nurse my drink. A few stools down, too precious for words, a tongue-studded, nose-ringed, lesbian couple, heads bowed close, whisper secrets and softly laugh. I want their love to last. I order a plate…

I’d read the book before but when the building blew up I found myself drawn in again. I knew the wife would yell, “Oh,” as her husband fell. There would be the blackness of the night and the way the world becomes a gray swirl before our eyes. I picked up a section of orange…