Poetry

My father rises each morning to the fourteen varieties of banana trees he’s cultivated with unrivaled care, each tree casting shade across our lawn, each racimo an offering my father hacks with his machete, a small cruelty he performs like a doctor circumcising a newborn, though I like to think he is unburdening these trees,…

We undress shy as a gun. * The mailman’s son, I am nor snow, nor night, nor gloom. * Her eyelashes long & false as an alarm. * He say, she say, foreplay, amscray. * Her cocktail dress pours over my bare floor. * Her feather boa hissing yes. * Without her I am incomplete—…

After Charles Johnson was leveled, the journey to heaven wasn’t long: for him, the dome of sky only 4,000 miles high, the stars about as far as San Francisco to Boston. Truth is something you iron out. The moonwalk? A hoax. Float too far and you fall off the earth like a barrel going over…

Slow drag— forest——otica A camera embedded in the eye of a butterfly’s hind wing captures gilded swans choking on cream. I can’t see the trees for the ugly irises. Like a honey thief flying at ground level, I gorge on the secret source of a runaway brook I have tied to a string. Night in…

Like a store for the too-well-off and unashamed, it is uncontained as the fists of tulips breaking through the last crust of snow. Avast, they say in books from the bookshelf about pirates, and there are windows yet to break, phone lines left to splice into and travel on down to the groves of Florida…

It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…

It only wanted to say everything at once, it would pull the very moment out of reach, it blessed the muskrat among rusted reeds gliding ahead of the shimmering geese and goslings— it was in how their caliper wakes broadened out, how the pond then zippered shut, in all that surface, in all the glittering…

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the…

You’ve made me your horse, and I don’t mind. When you leave town at midnight, debts unpaid and a hard wind lifting the dust out of your hair, I’ll take up new habits: whistling, chewing my nails. Bank robbery’s not so bad when you think about it. Outside my window the pin oak hisses and…