If this were the sea and not snow, morning- cold, Ohio, the slick, black trees standing for themselves along our ice creek, then these birds might seem ready for the flight. They’ve opened their massive wings, five, six feet across, and hold them to the cold sun as though cutting through salt winds unfettered. This…
xii. It was late May when I began the journal, a record of descents, tours of the abyss, & catalogues of blackness. One morning, I woke having dreamt I was the vehicle of aliens—no joke!—a stiff robotic self Impeccably designed to go out into our world & hunt other people. My alien Engineers had expected…
it was unusual to see children here, someone other than a woman in a housecoat (though it was afternoon it was after three) or a retired officer of some sort at the apartmentsthat looked like a strip mall one was gladto have the boy and girlriding their bicycles up and down the…
On the shore, the moon breaks on the rocks, gathering and shattering itself. The man admits surprise, how easily the point enters the heart. You have only the one day, it’s a birthday. You can smile, I am, he did. He buried iron pots and the cast-iron pan, he washed them, covered their surfaces…
no there is nothing today I want to read I want to gather you like the sky at sixteen I was a real beauty nudged to excellent ways of comforting I was told Radha he grows weak your silhouette and eyes the sculpture Tikkuman chisels forever too busy to take a wife and Radha they…
someone keeps snipping our frayed bottoms off and sticking our necks in cold water. Tonight, nothing revives us. Everything is Hail Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. I am sick to death of their lot. O tragedy, o fringy queen, that old scene. What do they do with the stars at night? Pluck them out as like…
You with your equation, an arrow plugs your heart, half in half out makes nowhere at all. You won’t admit it but what’s left is time: a patient sponge to stop your arrow from bleeding. It isn’t more years I want, just some older days. If a day had four hours more I think I…
Up or down it, disguise and discretion go both ways. Indifferent to tone, peeling paint adds cachet: patina proudly worn as uniform. Varnish sweats like skin in the stair. Concierge behind lace curtains waits for deliverance. Who cares if care has stained her age? Even spring is autumnal: pallor of sun and leaf on café…
* We must retract our offerings, burnt as they are. We must recall our lines of verse like faulty tires. We must flay the curatoriat, invest our sackcloth, and enter the academy single file. Poetry has yet to emerge. The image is no substitute. The image is an anecdote in the mouth of a stillborn….
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