for Kiernan when my daughter’s tugged home—diminishing yellow skull a balloon blown beyond the western pond—the raspberry tang of shampoo seeps into pillows and futon; her tuneless whistle needles the hall; the torn, lacy hem of her soul nestles among Victorian dolls strung in hammocks along one wall. Porcelain…
When I smashed the plastic Barney plate to smithereens, bashing it over and over against the slate rim of the sink as yellow shards flew all over the kitchen floor, the children were upstairs, and I was thankful they hadn’t seen me like that, or been scared. I could sweep up everything, through a smear…
Stone calcifies around it creating an impenetrable shell. In spite of its heaviness it floats somewhere in her body though she is never quite sure where until she stops to think about it. Probing, probing, hoping this time, this time that when she feels it bang against a rib or whack her heart, this time…
Why delay? Today I stopped to rub the fur, like the tender ear of a cat, stopped to stroke the lush gray plush (and oh, the pink!) as if the cat had rasped itself to frenzy, to an ecstasy of itch all raw this steak tartar, this chafe of meat, and because of this I…
I rejoice in the poems not written: the cruelly discarded: the crippled, the asthmatic, the anemic: the poem about a photograph: about what love is like: about how strangely I felt that day: about something about me, noticed. Bless you, go on the ash-heap, that fine compost from muscle, blood, bone, which fuels surely the…
The lovely lady posted in red No Hunting. Last night the supreme hunter crossed the meadow, into the house, to the target.
In the grand scheme of things, These words are smaller Than one pixel in a black And white photograph, A grain of sand, smaller Than molecules—no— Smaller than that. Zoom out, as in those old Science films in junior high, From one letter of one Of these words, out— To the room, above The house,…
I brush aside a spider from my arm, but he returns to scale the mountain of my knee, scuttle across my book, over page 64, and off the edge. Disoriented, thwarted, he pauses in the grass, then drops down, swaying from the tip of a green blade. Swooping from one to the next, the afternoon…
One of those early summer days, driving west on Carson Street, heading for parts unknown, singing aloud in my head, saying Lord, Lord, what am I to do? Not a heaviness in my heart, not a lightness in my heart, but the usual hum and rush of living in this city of bungalows and smokestacks…
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