Poetry

To Fly in Just Your Suit

Humans are flown, or fall; humans can’t fly. We’re down with the gravity-stemmers, rare, thick-boned, often basso. Most animals above the tides are airborne. Typically tuned keen, they throw the ground away with wire feet and swoop rings round it. Magpies, listening askance for their food in and under lawn, strut so hair-trigger they almost…

The River Merchant, Stuck in Kalamazoo, Writes His Wife a Letter During Her Semester Abroad

We were looking forward to being alive. Now you new place! Me not too! Strange taste afternoon lonely for hummingbird mouthful. You somewhere else make everywhere else elser. I know almost nothing about this flower growing from my chest. Does it need dead-heading? Only you not answer. This complete the test of the emergency broadcast…

False Memory

Who’ll pardon need? I was the baby & grasped things babywise: queer smells, voices, carpet nap all wrong. I crept backwards, nudged rear, rolled, sucked a red fist, knocked into & fingered at somebody’s new toy telephone, dialed up myself the house of murder: over there maybe fifteen tinny rings spooked the liver-&-white spaniel. Yelped…

Gargoyle’s Countdown

Now they’re singing inside in monks’ perfect time, a God-world-world waltz every three hours. Why harmonize with the damned chimes? Match what’s built, and nothing towers. Misfits, looking out (the mistakes of twos) from a roof, for a blind date, aim their gaze— the empty frozen whites of it—and hold fire. Eyes, go ahead, past…

Bully

Bully for you, you made Glee Club. A trumpet voluntary for you!— but the Safety Patrol monitor lizard ruffles around to me when I call. You made high C, the suicide note. Attention-getter!—a smattering stirs the bleachers & I too murmur up a platitude as it ruffles around to me. Glee Club folds away scales…

The Beauties of Nature

She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…

New Year’s Eve

Bare trees in front of brown buildings. A pale dry wreath. The bright red ribbon hanging and broken stands for all this century’s cruelty. The street is quiet. Mammoth fog spreads along the ground. The ribbon should be enormous, the road should be made of ribbon, the trees swathed, the babies swaddled. Men should open…

Prolepsis in Arrears

From a spoon to a city —Ernesto N. Rogers, designer, 1900–1969 In the useless pages of Domus, the trade journal of utilitarian interiors, no one’s friend sits on foam, having postconsumption microevents in series, in unsudden red contexts, in the crook of luxury. The dial was big and lobotomy-white wardrobe doors, blaring like mimes in…