Poetry

Quodlibet For a laugh, let’s list the things I lack:a foreskin, first & foremost—that was lootedlong before I noticed it; a knackfor foreign languages—my own included;memory—for all that I’ve alludedto; belief that gods or ghosts exist;the drive to love—& all that death’s polluted.Looking back, this is, in fact, a listof what I’ve had & lost…

Night whisperer, your hair’s tangled skeinof silver brushes our brows and the pastcomes crackling back, each jolt of joy or painas fresh, as strange, as when it struck us first. Daughter of thrumming earth and voiceless sky.Flame-keeping saint, yes, and two-timing slut;barnacle, shedding snake, and butterflyat once. Or farmer, sowing rows of doubt. To Zeus…

The image is of anOocyte breaking freefrom its containingcell wall an almost full moon framedby a whisper curlwhippoorwillof cloudthen later a rainbow      tinged frame                from below like a sill portends a bonfirefor May culminationsYour birthday again Your experiments        are Experiencestranslated into French O so tiredbut seethe lines connectingyou & meme & thee & he light goinginto me goes…

Crop of white furrowssown by splintered light.Pure cold, produce me.Brown mud un-burrowsgreen bark of the coniferwhose needles never leave.

“When he is very ferocious with me I cry;that sets all things straight,” Charlotte Brontë wrote.This passage strikes me as a little sly,yes? In it, Brontë almost seems to gloatabout the way that she has weaponizedher tears, her God-given power to emote.A male biographer once characterizedBrontë as “meek” on the basis of this quote—a reading…

Fourth Movement I was a man with one cow,one cow and no wife. I was a manwith clean shirts and no wife and one cow.I had strong shoes, pants with no knees.I had a bed. I was a man who sleptwithout his shoes, dreaming of one wifeand two cows. My shirts, which I did notwear…

For flowers that heal watercolor purple TyrianDesire that possesses you sugar in the raw Naturally fond of morning star evening starWhenever Venus comes to upper purple register I feel you do you feel me electrically hereIn a rose vine room imaginary couple Reader writer reader I wish for you playJoy and a way to move…

Zach loves to sing Hi-ho, the derry-o, Obama in the dell.So charmed am I, I don’t correct him, conjuring upthe president standing in a lush nursery rhyme valley,meeting Michelle. Obama takes a wife. Then they are offto kids and cows, dogs and mice, a totally different life. A few years later, Zach’s little brother Alex begs to beDonald…

At the Bronx Zoo Everyone mentions them in the same breath,lions and tigers. How strange, then, to seethey are more different than anyone guessed:based on the two we were lucky to see,lions bask lazily in the same spothour after hour, not afraid to be spotted,scrutinized, photographed, chattered about,in contrast to tigers, who stride through the…