Poetry

Headset

The sun gives us our genesis, he said, but is not itself the genesis     of our being. Connected. Yet portable, I countered, sauntering down the carpeted hallway     speaking seductively into. My floating microphone. Much like the current rash of pop-     show singers, who may dance. As if possessed by demons while lip-synching,…

Fifth Circle (The Wrathful)

Tap tap, you’ve planted a scarecrow at the center of your field of broken stones. Watch it grow, watch it. You’ve nailed her to the desolation tree blossoming over this field where somebody buried seed long ago. Bone hammer, crooked hammer, thing nailed to a tree. What love would look like. What home would look…

Aster

Among the peopled flowers my legitimate crankiness forced into diaspora, none have been more far-flung than the aster. I do not understand how such star structures are formed. Unlike me, the aster throws rays blazing from white to pink or purple about a disk that is usually yellow. Flower heads of a composite type leave…

The Invention of the Nightwatch

was the often walks            it’s in all the books—psalms, Solomon,                                           the ones with all the pictures of men walking at night.      A legion of staves, and etched onto the leaves,            where here I have witnessed some blind world of the blind beneath a torch held in a sheaf on which sketched, a face,   Says…

The Nature and Causes Of

Adumbrate. Omne animalum               post coitam tristam sunt. Had this boyfriend once recited Latin to me as we walked across the campus to B & E an empty house—some physics major. I thought romantic. As in, the streetcast shadow adumbrates the sleeping wall. A fickle, melancholy, sketchy trait. See more at umbrage. And if I partially…

Wilderness Is Everywhere

Do you have roots? Or do you picture yourself an astronaut inside      a bubble suit. Altitudinous above the troposphere, suspended like candy below     the exosphere. Connected to a stalled, mechanized version of your future self by     a twisting. Gold umbilicus: how sweet to be (simultaneously) the     perpetrator and the crime’s. Sole…

Natural Light

That summer I saw you as a bird, a whitethroat singing O Sweet Canada Canada but a strange sooty color, then as the dwarf peach that had never borne ruddy with hanging fruit, actually bedecked like a Christmas tree. Everything promised transformation, day into night, stars unrolling like an opera score for owls, crickets, and…

Circle of Blades

for Taha Muhammad Ali and for Aaron Shabtai From nothing but his fear, and kiss her cunning brows Who braves the risen salar, daughter’s bursting ripeness Moaning through the sash, he marries to a settler The crown sits on his head, to hold her as he wants For him the dead king’s wife, in a…

Toothpick Warriors

Night sweats to the rattle and clink of their armor— marching grooves around my bed, pulling toothpicks from tatami to disembowel each other, or skewer and roast a beetle, fine bone china of their sake cups rolling the sound of marbles when they drop them on the hard- wood floors at dawn. You think I’m…