Poetry

  • Note to All Concerned

    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…

  • I Unbutton My Blouse

    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…

  • Forsooth,

    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…

  • To Zeno

    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…

  • Rue Monge Narrated

    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…

  • Disorders of Skin

    Rain (as it will). And it is dusk. And you with song upon slim voice. There is need: A reminiscence. (Partaken.) Baptized Presbyterian. We remember the names. The names. Their passing. Were days or something close. Closed. Coiled in our attic bed. To wrap ourselves (us even) as it would be. (There was singing. a…

  • In Which Nothing Warns You When You Are Going Astray

    for Lee Chapman The sky first. Hobbled by an absence,                          no vertebrae, the weight of an incessant moon—that extraction to one’s own madly grinning                                  core over and over. And those stars itching away like a feast of lice; even its underpinnings are strung                 only to echo      to echo . . ….