Poetry

You cannot befriend the waiter even if you call him Phillip and ask if his daughter is better even if he greets you more or less by name and remembers that you favor the more modest merlots. He is on his feet and you are a chair. When he passes through the swinging doors into…

He was, in those years, the wizard of the place, the state’s most famous seasonal resident, primordial snowbird, genius of machinery in a kingdom whose vegetable dynamos outpulsed anything even his well-greased corporate laboratories might envision, imperator of science swathed in green, cocooned in jungle xylem, this man who would bring light into the darkness…

In moments between preoccupations, in those pauses punctuated by the sound of malm being ground up by bricklayers, or by the scolding magpies, or by Paula praying quietly with her garnet beads— the click and suspirations—he swabs his brow and thinks about what sets apart one interval from another: how a specific point must be…

November like a train wreck as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze but there’s a soup special at Wafflehouse and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,…

The writer of our day has become especially repulsive recently by walking in public without his pants hind-end first and mournfully displaying to the world the place that hurts, and this place hurts him because he does not know where he can sit down peacefully. —Maxim Gorky Down the hill past the bakery you air…

The radio voice speaks in French and so does the other radio voice. Kill the radio and the wind gets hot. In Wolf Point, the Sioux waitress with blue eyes and a figure like a bar of soap lets you change your order, but Delores won’t like it, she says. “Oh, I need about a…

My solemn hens. Electric bulb, the door Locked twice. To keep from hearing the promise of Coyote we dream of the rooster claiming dawn Even as he flees to the unknown forest. But morning brings back what remains And as I enter all eyes turn golden; The autumn haunches shift. How quickly they forget What…

1. I don’t want to say, “This is called . . .” when I’m the one who called it this. 2. I don’t want to explain a poem to people. I want them to explain it to me. 3. I don’t want to pull rabbits out of top hats. But I’d love to hold a…

Ann Mikolowski, 1940–1999 dead/as in                          center                          or right Goya titled his paintings of war things like Shouting’s No Good and Nobody Could Help Them Gaundi hung weights to visualize and actualize his works upside down and now strange hands have forced on a brutality that Gaundi never meant no fluidity in somebody’s else’s…