Poetry

  • Common Blue

    Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand…

  • Middle-Class Regalia as Iconographic Vanitas

    Desire zeroing in on that Furby eBay auction             while smut chat gets caught up in the Hegelian carpet role—the secrets of your life             scrawled on Post-it notes that fell off of your dash—a pack of Lucky Strikes stairmastered into             Liberty’s verdigrised torch— Ellis Island heavier than an oil freighter grounded             in…

  • The Mattress

    Meredith Drum is an atomic bomb, a puppet, is confetti and napalm. Maybe she’s a peony grown annually for the flower show. This year’s first-prize installation, a Hiroshima Imperial Hotel room shattered, bouquets wetting the beds. Through the woods, in darkness obscuring our feet, she leads a few thieves. Foxfire on the trees. She rubs…

  • The Hotel Delano

    At the Delano, the flags are flying half-mast, Honoring the workers released from debt and poverty By the death of parents, by murder, freed by inheritance. “We’ve killed them all,” shout the street cleaners Marching through the lobby with bloodstained hands. Chambermaids wrap themselves like brides in the damask drapes, “We poisoned ours, their miserly…

  • 800 Acres on the Plains

    High Lonesome tipped back his hat and his horses snorted. Maybelle nodded, her teacher’s smile a wild azalea in miles of cactus. My uncle’s buckboard groaned to a stop, in town for flour and grease and beans. All that, decades ago, before he taught me how to cowboy. Five summers we broke broncs, patched fences…

  • Hands

    Sleeping in your Harlem apartment, I lie on the bed by the window to the airshaft, a dark flume cutting the center of the building, a pigeon’s alley from basement to roof. My head on the sill, I stretch my hands out. You’re in the next room at the upright, winning a young composer’s prize….

  • The Fix and the Fall

    The fuzz knows the whiz and vice versa. This leads to cooperation. Your average dick is on the shake. A little jack will make him right. Count on a C-note per man per day; if there’s no bad beefs, you’re okay. Once you’ve fixed the bull, even when a mark blows, he’ll give you a…