Poetry

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

We are not surprised, those of us who are made, we’ve been told, in God’s image, that our God, who has not tissue nor tail, is a jealous God. What makes us snappish, after all, about God is impeccability but if jealousy makes us also Godlike—and if that’s where our love turned wrong— then there…

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…

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…

Pursued by her suitor and he, by her father: one appears monstrous, the other no bigger than her thumb. Parallax, paradox, open the locks. She nailed her shadow to the fork of a tree against pursuit. Two knives crossed put a hex on the table. She read disaster ahead: three swans flying together, an infant…