Poetry

  • 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…

  • The Lilies of the Field

    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…

  • Education by Stone

    after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…

  • Mutating Villanelle

    Because God wants us to have indefinite life, like Him, Richard Seed intends to electroshock an egg to implant his image and likeness into Gloria, his wife             (to implant into Gloria, his menopausal wife, his                      shocked image and likeness) after inducing quiescence in its nucleus (moon-pause) so his DNA might nest there and…

  • Overture

    for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….