Poetry

  • Familiarity

    Teenagers for sure, one black, one white, so when did they have that terrified, high-pigtailed child? in yellow and pink, screaming Mommy, Mommy, at Sherman and Walden as I bike through. The boy stands in the street, you’d say irresolute, but his (good-looking) face is calm. As if I were the child I see the…

  • Gospel of the Two Sisters

    Long ago two sisters lived in a small brick house beside a superhighway. The tall chatty one knew the first & last name of every animal in the galaxy. The small quiet one could make her hair grow longer or shorter with no more than a thought. The pecan-colored sister said, “I wish I had…

  • Snowfall

    Yesterday’s snow falling again and already. Falling steadily among the vowels, the tall consonants. Alertnesses scumbling among the cabbages. The eyebrowed jay named by a man named for a star. Stellar’s. When I say the word the pleasure happens on my palate and I am never the same person again. Smoke. Granular. Piñon. Clouds slumping…

  • Wake

    Widening line of light What isn’t inked            (“the area of its competence A visit to the morgue at night? (Averse?)                           Traversed By the frame A hand (reaching in? withdrawing                           (From outside To lift                 (this sheet) Sheer homesickness—the text * Awoke a serial homesickness (the text) for a place you lived in—off and…

  • The Accounting

    Numbers scraping their heels all night in the attic above them. The accounting was necessary but brought them near death. Like a fountain emptying itself for the tourists. Couldn’t the woman in the restaurant in the booth in the semi-     private room open her shirt? In one view the numbers represented his errors of…

  • The Fall/The Unthinkable

    Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also auch nicht sagen was wir nicht denken können —Wittgenstein A bewilderment, his wilting sense of betrayal, a wilderness— he composed the history of his own privacy. If you can’t imagine it you can’t think about it; you can’t talk about what you…