Poetry

Like the deer who kept returning to our office because for months the receptionist left salt licks in the underbrush.                                         How would it know the receptionist died sledding with her children in a late spring snow?                                         Sometimes pain becomes the deer—it keeps showing up though I have nothing to give it, so I watch it…

Now your child can visit steamy jungles, grassy plains, and the dark depths of the oceans. To meet and learn surprising facts about the magnificent animals that live there! —Zoobooks Commercial     Today, I’ve been lying 40 minutes in the grass with a book, at the quad, in between paths both running together and…

has gone mad about you and your recent remarks on black life. My father suggests cremation if I die before him because it’s cheaper. I want to be cremated. I’ve wept over a bad embalming job. Might I ask, why aren’t you online talking about my eyes? Or where you go when you want to…

We were sitting shoulder to shoulder looking at the fires in the canyon and I said something about distance, desire   moving from archive to digital, I was thinking of starting something, despite time zones or children, husbands   or wives. The clouds parted an instant, I thought I saw the shadow of cumulus cross…

What happens to good girls? They get presents. What happens to bad girls? They get tied up & locked in the closet.   A stiletto was first a pen, Then a dagger, Now a heel. Caravaggio’s Medusa was painted on a shield. The painting itself is an object of warfare. I wear purple marks from…

A day of Prosecco & maps. You inhaled the musk from my hair. You drove my childhood curves; I dressed in the part.   I rode shotgun in Your dead father’s Porsche. The car he never lived to drive. The car he never could afford.   Tupac took us up to the hill town, Bach…

“I have nothing at all to say But I want to say it anyway…”           —Marcello Mastroianni, 8½     In my perfect 6-year-old French I’m singing Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? before the white caps and the waves’ salt spray—it’s the only song I know to the end, the only world…                                         Sun burning through the…

your way of avoiding me is just as good as mine—   one stone fence, one last little field—i won’t bother   anyone here if you won’t— but we ruined Saturday,   agreeing to just amble in the rain when really   the important strangers beckoned us   because they needed both of us at…

The lonely, young, blond woman in a big gray coat sits by one, small, open window all morning.   The lonely, young, gray-coated woman can stay there all day.   The coat cannot be gray before big. The window must be small before it is open.   If the woman is lonely, she is usually…