Corolla, the part composed of petals. Corymb, the flat-topped, vague inflorescence opened first. Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms, my friend, the botanist, says, a line inserted in her chest below the breast, through a cleft and fixed to a pump she calls Marion, after her doctor. Marion…
Your head is the heaviest cabbage in the world, full of spiced apples and lamb. Where you are is where you must be—a gravel parking lot by a squat cinder-block building, slumped, a dropped marionette. You breathe, a ray aside a bucket of chum— after giving up the hook. The bow toward the big city….
Early January—gray millennial sky, clumps of snow the color of oysters here, there, under the besieged hemlocks. I follow my little dog along our gravel road to the brook crossing—there’s sludge and chain oil and silt in the roily water where the dog sniffs around, tail low, lifting his leg, claiming acreage; but it all…
translated by Angela Ball When dolphins follow the boats, they dress in pink to soften the hate in men’s gazes. “How can they hate us if we make love like they do?” Many say that at night the dolphins grow pubic hair and go out stealing women. The children think that the dolphins are gringos…
translated by Angela Ball The people of this town are allowed to have as many masks as they can buy. Our parents work, and we have fun playing blind man’s bluff and cowboys. The closets are full of masks, but on Halloween the chief of police prohibits disguises. That night the masks have to talk…
for Eleanor Wilner Sometimes there is even too much of what we don’t want. This dancing planet, its many communiqués hurtling across us. My lover types endearments into space, swears he can only see my back. Something in it that is diluted and dark, something in the distance that is lunar,…
Words, together we’ll have the wedding feast, I’ll spread the canopy, bring the glass for you to crush. You’ll arrive early, time and light in your pocket, dark boxes in the car, each with the name of an object. Alone this way, no guests expected—jars, bottles, vials with things like knife, cloud, and blood. Leave…
Glad to see people thought of it, brought Warren’s darts, a bag of chewing tobacco, his baseball cap, a book of poems, some photos. Glad that the mortician tried his best to dress him in coat, shirt, and tie—the wound was through the back and out the chest, I keep thinking—and firm the lip, close…
Slice of yellow wind in yellow curtains I sewed although the house was never mine except where the rod went through. Breeze does it. Or snow on pines. Faint click of yellowing spoons. Or crow-call piercing snow-pine reflected in the spoon-shaped past, its wing its crescent moon. Seeking any equally black thing. There,…
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