Poetry

  • After Issa

    When was the last time     you blew your nose         on a morning glory? Toddler sister picked the morning     glory—but not to do this,         but to do that. Squatting in the woods—     the broad soft leaf,         always most welcome. Your devout prayer is answered     when the broad leaf        …

  • Marblehead

    The first item up for bid: a charming new gazebo. It’s made of wood that smells like wood that smells like gunpowder. Like everywhere, it is a place to sit. But this is different. I mean, you can put the cat in there, and before you know it, catheter. I think I didn’t say that…

  • Head over Heels

    Holding hands on the big wheel fifty feet above the Tuileries’ evening jasmine, I loved your play at fear, my brave stab at insouciance, the way the bright circuitry of Paris lay beneath us like the night sky, like the plan of our lives.

  • Set Piece

    The infinitive is a conservation law. Not to mention all the other things Without which we would have been lost, Like the diamond engagement ring Or the parsimony of the rich. A different context is a different play. The girl in the coffee shop Was a woman onstage. Timor mortis conturbat me. Philadelphia left me…

  • The Great Submarine Race

    It’s mad, but it just might work, he said, and floridly signed his name to The Great Submarine Race. Submarines slumbered in his bloodstream and submarines burbled in shallow slips. The Flying Electrons bore the news around the world on cold white drafts and the news pierced the blue clouds. A man in the square…

  • Inc.

    I stroll among wounded merchants’ daughters. What to buy? What to wear? The questions dreadless enough. I take them down from their posts. Heart cuff, woodpecker wing, suit-so-sorry. News of the repeating, damned repeating. Circles the sky. Once I tried crooning and fell apart simply. The girls in slit skirts made an art of revealing….

  • Dark Room

    1. His camera absorbing the veld to expose its slow, tectonic motion, to let the inevitable gazelles graze the film as he rests easy, sleeping in emerging wheat . . . 2. Six years they coexisted in his case, symbiotic within silver slivers, as if forsaking faith in days to date in the negative. 3….

  • 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…