Poetry

Listen, Leo, remember the lifeboat we pilfered from what you said was an abandoned garage sale, 1442 Columbus, not the explorer, the street? Last night I came to, retired to the basement to ponder my position on circumspection, the fate of the cruel & unusual, & drink until I passed out. I had my underwear…

Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…

The first birds chirp again, as if they heard the whole late July planet tilting with new law. Goose honk and crow caw and squirrel jabber are dawn light crawling up the huge maple trunk, tinting rough gray wood till it glows, green and mossy and tropical in the tilted passing of planetary items. This…

When our reprieve began I was reintroduced to Osip, my husband— a gaunt man who walked clutching his trousers. (Belts could be used for suicide, a serious offense.) The prison staff was rosy-faced. The young learn quickly: To kill is good, to be killed, bad. Soon they rise in the ranks, have their photos taken…

When we undressed in the tack room, we kept our backs turned, cradled our new breasts like the barn cat’s kittens and counted ribbons strung like tiny laundry overhead: blue, red, yellow, white, pink, green. We giggled in the dark there over the school nurse’s diagram, the new words. But we all said yes, as…

Flat, jaw-dropped face of a Downs kid, half-shut eyes, pale lids like two oysters. A wide, squat body, a slowness, he sits on a low wall, rocks forward and back with his whole torso, face blank with the rhythm of pushing a stroller forward and back, that soothing, shushing motion. My baby waits at home;…

for Osip Mandelstam   For us, all that’s left is a dried bee, tilted onto one wing. Not long ago, a bloom fastened its tongue, while its belly tried unsuccessfully to tip it backwards. We mustn’t touch— anything without water is without give. This bee is our scout— one day, dust will pronounce itself in…

A drunk man reels his tractor around the square lawn, midnight. His wife stares from the front door window as if on a half-sunk ship’s deck at a shark tearing through the dark water. She chews her thumbnail raw. Two of their sons, in blue pajamas, shuffle across the linoleum rubbing their eyes. She plays…

From a rain-stained square tunneled into the rough-shingled roof, the skylight begins, in small creaks, to complain. I crane, look straight up at the bottoms of two black feet— three prongs and inches, each; between them dips the hammock of a full-bellied crow, round and big as the cauldron he belongs in. From below, I…