Poetry

How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets, thought’s curare, when I finally dialed Tami Jamison, numbing my lips too much to speak? How often did I think, “I’m dead,” feeling my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs, sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of…

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…

Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name  II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…

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…