Poetry

  • Poet/Stalker

    for J.L. Thanks for your fan letter—I’ve built a shrine. I was up all night thinking of you up all night studying my use of slant and internal rhyme in A Shoemaker’s Dystopia. By line 317 the scheme I fear is obvious, so I was giddy as salmon at spawn that you found my little…

  • Structure

    Among the fossil fuels structure stands, clearly: crude, it burns; but refined— into frou- frouiest lace, or the baroquest and most willowy affectation in snowflakes —how ever so much more quickly the flames go. A standing house is a standing invitation to the match, with each gable, twilled turret, or fantastical arch floating on air,…

  • Hippocampus

    A bell is gonged, the body of a girl curled up inside it, a town grown wild, dogs sniffing skyward— gong, gong. They listen all night for the girl to fall, her stomach to growl, or is it a foot in a mindless gallop, snorts of delight as the gods take up the virgin-offer, or…

  • Paint

    Paint is what it is and what it ain’t. A shape or a shell, when dry, that can make what it was painted on seem extraneous. Like a house— who can imagine the canary-yellow smooth or rough integument slough off? And yet, if it did: if you were to take the supports out (the house…

  • Animadversion

    Simple isn’t it? The way a fugue begins— a voice alone, another, then another— a mass of math and tangle, tumble, flash! stretto . . . Finally solo even dotted God with stars moves out. Nothing moves in.

  • There Was a Stare

    There was a stare (yes, was) right here (hope it finds me). Right where the moon blared down its tinny gap. Prevalent predator. Originating—where? Smoke and opal, compressed to a null. Hey orb, what lives in that shell heath, shriek shack? Hey bleach-blink, sheen-gaze, pearl-pith—root of worlds. Splinter in the void’s eye, orphan. Got a…

  • In the Garden

               And the sky! Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm Of an empty nursery. Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade. The grass was lizarding, Green and on a rampage. Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem. Noon. This noon— Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom. The grass was lizarding.