Poetry

  • Sunspot

    I think I will become a selfish man. That’s what it will take to purge myself of my sick need to give. Strong is stubborn, many-limbed, but single-minded. Alone. I think I will be just like Eric was in boarding school. Early in the morning, when insomniacs sit awake, I would watch him running hard…

  • Seen

    In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed. It is a place where injury carved its cave of nothing, gathered blackness around a splinter’s wooden slip. One eye, you say, looks inward while the other scans the world. One eye examines the self’s invisible wanting. In that equation, I…

  • Seduction

    You and I lay together on a grassy bed while one sparrow chased another from a limb. A bumblebee left a flower he seduced, and flew away covered in her scent. I reached my lips to catch your lips before they turned away. “Just a kiss, please a kiss.” “It always starts the same way,…

  • Trees

    One summer he planted a tree it was young, just a few branches no bigger than a rosebush. We were intent on watching it we were young we wanted the fruit to come. Father brought the coffee can outside paced between the tree and the backyard spigot. We liked to watch him fill the can…

  • An Awful Story

    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…

  • Mercury

    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…

  • Obit

    The lovely lady posted in red No Hunting. Last night the supreme hunter crossed the meadow, into the house, to the target.

  • Missing World

    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,…

  • Spider Time

    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…