Poetry

He showed me brochures for the last moment of my life. He had done an elaborate makeup job on his wrists, so it would look as if he had tried to commit suicide. He gave me a ring, bright as the eyes of a child on a stupid church trip. Our families threw advice at…

I knew a force lay hidden in the air that could raise this heat from only a spark, lick the sky and still be hungry. I lit a page of rolled up news and ran out back with arm upraised and stuck it under. It didn’t catch at first. I threw a cup of diesel…

In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy— this one loves that one who loves someone else. The doctor, a fixture of the plays, is always old as Chekhov, who died young, must have felt himself to be. And the aging writer, who also resembles Chekhov, chases a girl he will abandon soon and is stuck with the habit…

You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps.                                                               I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails.                                          You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…

Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…

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…

I’ve covered hundreds of miles in search of the perfect song—records often so ruined they sound buried as if they were being played under the floor. Along with 78’s, Stanley’s Old Furniture Store sold miniatures: homunculi, chairs for mice, golf carts and threshers, a pair of Guernseys housed in a matchbox. I studied these as…

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…