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.