Poetry

  • Escaping God

    When you shut your eyes to daydream, you’re really imagining the face of God, who, in the fifties, assumed the face of Mrs. Oshkenozi, who sat in her apartment window handing glasses of tap water to boys in pursuit of perfect stickball. Grandpa & his compatriots puffed unfiltered Camels & flirted with imperfect hands of…

  • Sway

    A noose of moonlight— I think I see what my father saw That night when he went out To the leaning barn— He followed the light, Scared up some rope in the tack room To toss over the beam.        The wind rending itself             through barbed fences. I found him The next morning, Kneeling…

  • Bad Impression

    Right now the men put aside     their composing sticks and settle by the hellbox     chatting in groups that never seem to vary     from day to day. Naturally I’m anxious to fit     in naturally, to be considered one amongst     metal men and composers. I hesitate on the edge of     the…

  • Invisible Dreams

    “La poésie vit d’insomnie perpétuelle.” —Rene Char There’s a sickness in me. During the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth. I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust…

  • Rapunzel’s Exile

    I was told to lie down in the cart, and I did. My braided hair mixed with straw under me to catch the blood I seeped. Then she covered me with heavy furs and brush. The night was stark and cold, the stars close and multiplying like cells as we creaked along under them a…

  • Mercy on Broadway

    Saturday, Eighth and Broadway, a dozen turtles the color of crushed mint try for the ruby rim of a white enamel bowl on the sidewalk, wet jade jewel cases climbing two or three times the length of their bodies toward heaven till the slick sides of the bowl send them sliding back into their brothers’…

  • The Company We Keep

    1. The one she loves she hates. And too late, she says, for the thing love’s become to let her loose from its grip. They take it to the hills. Green tent in blue mountains. They’d bought themselves fishing licenses, and the conversation began on trout—cutthroat and Dolly V’s—names bruised and asthmatically deep inside the…

  • Night Train

    I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…