Poetry

You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead. Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor. A trill of orchids wilts over the rim. You will…

A year later, a Tuesday or Wednesday,           I remember the students out back playing tennis           in air so cold it puckered the rain barrel & my radio said what it           couldn’t say while Big Joe did bench presses in the basement           & the radio went idiotically silent. Remember Al Hibler singing…

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…

I went to the river, but the river was dry. I fell to my knees, and looked to the sky. —Emmylou Harris Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every column, says…

The moment before I was born Mom sent Dad to Kepley’s Drive-in for a country ham sandwich. My unspoken name was country ham sandwich. My spoken name was tank because I rolled over and crushed the world, and was made of green metal. I was later called “surprise,” a polite name for stolen. Go to…

I. The land beside me filled with snakes. I would lose my land. They would come on camels, they would come on elephants. They would take Woman from the dark stone room. Knock over the clay. Knock the wind against the wall. Let it scatter. II. The order of the pebbles this way goes. Which…

Death does not speak to me with meaty breath although ancient hamburgers dance through my veins and the leering buffalo skull on the wall above my couch dribbles drool onto my heart. At fifty, I have learned to see the Grim Reaper in all his disguises. I can see him in a can of Budweiser….