Poetry

Please note well, all you writers, editors, directors out there: when a phone call is terminated by the other person you do not, NOT, hear the buzz of a dial tone. You hear a faint click and then silence, absolute silence, the Great Silence, more eloquent than any electronic buzz could ever be. In fact…

One morning beginning to notice which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it. How quietly the abandoned body keens, like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves. Rain or objects call the forgotten back: the droplets’ placid girth and weight; the dresser’s lack of     ambition. How strange it is…

Because her hair looked cool Because some of the best alien minds are watching     developments closely Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the     masculine mills Of production, yet wearing out six black pantsuits To bring us to acculturation and consequence Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate…

I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup, and in that moment, I became another person. It was an early spring evening, the air California mild. Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway. The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open….

Though the memory doesn’t feel like mine, I must have been there, moving north northwest, holding, up above the Perfume River, with Simon, Isaac, our Arab gunner, Vince, called Pineapple because of his face, the NVA who kept on smiling, who would not stop to save his own life, and Peter who had stopped asking…

Down among the art shows     they made some striking models, grotesqueries! It made us think     life wasn’t quite like that was! It certainly gave us pause.     It certainly gave us pause for thought. The room that had no windows     was interesting. The pictures where every face was always     the artist’s…

The symposium entitled Why a Machine Can Write Better than You, and Does wasn’t nearly as popular as Flamethrowers: Is There One in Your Future?, and neither could hold a candle to Guppies in the Kitchen: A Normative Reading. The preponderance of jaded gardeners at Low-Maintenance Gravel: Future’s Flower was nearly equaled by the architects-on-the-lam…

The last withered one held so long by such a weak tree. Who needed who? I’ll never know. It’s over. The apple just dropped to the snow crust. Things have changed. It’s the only color in the field. The one-eyed gray squirrel finds it by positioning his head to see the side blind to him….

On that January day of gales and sleety squalls the women were being married high on the hill above the city, in the chapel of the University and afterwards they stood in the cloisters shivering in their wedding gowns, being photographed, singly or with a kilted husband by their side the men taking quick drags…