Poetry

The child freestyles in the shower, battling yellow tiles with a steam-heavy tongue.                        Siblings can wait while s/he rhymes the hot water to an end. Braggadocio and bubblegum toothpaste blend, beatless. S/he spits and spits and spits until words harden like lime crust on the spray head. Have to get the neck into it—flexing…

Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…

                     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…

Thus what we’ve learned is that our greatest poets were death-obsessed loners who seldom enjoyed the pleasures of lovers despite living in a constant state of sexual excitation. They started as revolutionaries and atheists, or they went to Harvard and voted Republican and mowed the yard. The night sky was starry and told them stories….