Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way. Oh, listen, listen— It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…
I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….
What did Sinclair Lewis say about sweet potatoes, or rather Upton Sinclair, or red potatoes? Crows. Crows all day. And the river holding on to the mist, sixty watts of sunshine at noon and the smell of cadmium under the bridge, coal yards and dumps, the boat launch south of the locks, fission in a…
Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…
If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…
A little atomic number on the sale rack. Lots of castles. Lots of knives and forks. Lots of closet skeletons. The fitting room flooded with the strands of the score he left on her answering machine. A drive-in movie screen: their cloud-built bed stuffed with opera lens and whatnots. How they loved to Euro the…
The job was pushing a rod. Steel rod in a V-channel with a stick. With a stick pushing a rod against a wheel. Which spinning ground the rod. Which screaming made sparks which bit my skin. Pushing a rod with a stick while being bitten by sparks was the job. Which required breath at the…
These cyan-colored snails emerge from the white Umbrian mist with murder on their minds—memories of slow rainy Saturdays—how the city of Firenze looked to Perugino on the day his second son was born—Lord Byron’s lost reflection buried under the pebbles in the springs of Fonti del Clitunno. I feel that snail itching its way across…
I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana. It was spring in North Carolina: the birds fabricating their nests while I was dipping myself like a tea bag over and over in my own despair. What I like about The Ramayana is how each character suspects there is more than they know to the story….
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