Poetry

  • The Sentimental Museum

    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…

  • Writer in Exile

    I’ve wished that I were born a Soviet, so that my presence in America would cause as greatly dignified regret as leads to literary coups d’état— but I am merely Cuban, dark and small as any from a hundred nations which exist for other’s domination. All I say is colonized, if not by rich “protectors,”…

  • From a Shaded Porch

    Mid-August. Crippling heat. Torpor. Lungs weighed down by the stubborn air. Sudden, hyperbolic, dog-startling storms each afternoon, uninspired repertoire of kettle- and window-rattling. Who’d settle for an arrangement like this? Who wouldn’t? Too hot to do otherwise. Hard to think twice or overachieve in such weather. One is compelled to be dumb, to slump on…

  • Portrait Studies

    May 24 A shake erupts, a self-guffaw. Some miles up, he reads a life, detailed with his own, by drugstore specs on a wasp-boy’s cord. His focus is keen, a screen. Elated as he gets in this fake air, the book’s a scream. Another shake. Across his aisle, two toddlers shriek strange alphabets and wail;…

  • Blow Your House Down

    So the question becomes—no offense— are men wolves or are men slop? Because my heart is definitely a pig. Each boy sings like a halfwit alone in a barn: Little pig heart, little pig heart, let me in. Oh yes, those farm boys let loose to form cities have a way with words. My whiskered…