The movie about the great Siberian rose, Brought back to life by the doctor who killed her, Was playing a block away at the Lane. The usher Was dressed like a nurse, and scowled, and told us Not to make noise. I wish we had For as soon as the movie began, a tomblike room…
Watermelon, not pomegranate, is the fruit of the dead. I eat it for breakfast these hot midsummer days to feel my spellbound mouth crunch the cool flesh, so many seeds to tease out with the tip of my tongue and spit onto my plate with a small clatter. The dead thirst for…
“The poem is a sort of animal.” —Ted Hughes I give him words to tell me who he is. He gives them back, begins a visual discourse on invisibility, gunning by me a film in snippets & jump-shots, starring him. Light flashes everywhere. But you can still make out frames that form a…
Lying in bed we feel soon We’ll do what’s right and end The wrong thing we’ve come to be, I to you, and you to me. Not all of us, as it turned out, Was wrong. Years one and two, For one . . . And perhaps remembering That time again, we turn to make…
Say a calling knocks you out of sleep, draws blood, is accessible only by water. Say you believe you own your life but you have looked away and your absence has already begun. You struggle out patched together by medication and makeup scaling the broken cadence, the frost-heaved lanes, walking papers clenched to your chest….
There are nights I dream of goldfish and in my dreams they sing to me in fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Although in the daylight they are mostly silent and ravenous— the suction-cup grip of their mouths on my fingertip like tiny rubber bath- room plungers when they rise to strike at…
The shadow of a falling bird against a building is more real than the bird. Shadow of a glioblastoma on an MRI is not real at all. It will be short and brutal, the doctor says. She sees the shadow of her head on his shirt, sees a framed photo of the shadow of a…
Those beads of lapis, even the classical Blues of dawn, are dimmed by comparison. When I hand you this bunch of cornflowers The only other color in the room Illumines your eyes as you arrange them. They are the blue reflection of whatever Moves in you, serene as cool water tipped Into crystal, oddly enough…
Slate gray lake. Willows in a rough wind. On the far island, where the shoreline is tattered with fallen trees, it is not yet spring. The waves won’t allow it. Won’t allow anyone to land there, let alone to leave. Not today; maybe not for a long time to come. The bramble takes…
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