Poetry

When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and…

A vial of it: dusty, warm From being held so long In my hand; the little cork that fit So well, the cap I would undo In secret, sprawling on the floor Of the basement, recalling a scene From Kafka, or glancing in horror At the old vermilion volume On Chinese torture, or savoring The…

1. The Sandbox We celebrated a funeral for a dead ladybug and smoothed the surface with the belly of a spoon. Who would count the tiny dots now, or study the long crawl and sudden flight? We dug a pit for a hemlock leaf curled into itself. We said last rites for a fleck of…

That which you made me do I did. That which you made me say I said. Now the blame, like oil over water, spreads, and so our life together that began in vows—the licensed oath— has leased itself back to us both: what we knew and couldn’t know what our words no longer show.

for Cathal Ó Searcaigh, granted one wish by the fairy youth, wants nothing, so help me, but one dropdead kiss from the youth, but how can he forget Jack Nolan who wished away Death for all mankind, Falcarragh’s     own Jack Nolan whose uncharacteristically generous wish trapped Death in his fisherman’s duffle, a large-hearted wish…

For a week it’s been spinning the tale of a thing about to believe its new body. Today the eyes are gone, the center split where form sidestepped its own riven length. That’s just likeness hinged to the tree. A souvenir. A transparency. To find it now make a space in the ear in the…

When my grandmother left the house                 to live with my aunts, my grandfather, who spent so much time in the sugar                           cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness of the clapboard house he built                 with his own hands, and he sat in the dark to eat beans he cooked right in the…

in memory of F.C. (1965–1991), who died of AIDS complications But there under the dark eaves of rain forest, we found Broughtonia, its crimson petals aflame, its yellow throat, veins hinting purple, rising to a sanguine corolla surrounded by sepals as crinkled as mourning crepe. We followed a path lengthened slash by slash, the islanders…

Because the world insists on still giving and giving at six, mastering addition seemed its natural complement, a kind of cataloguing the earth’s surplus. I loved the fat green pencil shedding graphite as I pressed rounded threes, looping eights into the speckled yellow newsprint. Loved, too, the sturdy, crossed bars of the plus sign, carrying…