Poetry

It is just a family. am just a girl posing at the mirror in a flowered cotton shift, combing back my short hair, deciding whether I’m beautiful. I know the creak in the floor by heart and the hiss of the door behind me, drawing itself shut. When I cross the room, my brothers and…

. . . only making love to you wasn’t I curious about the rest of experience . . . —Jane Miller once i snake my dress off i will loll still as volts train my feet to paint opposing murals if a riff of flesh will halve me on this tasty day in the luxurious…

It was the wrong place to look for resurrection. Memorial Day, one hundred four degrees Fahrenheit. Cloudless sky. Square parking lots surrounding new motels. Always more loss required, always. And after, feeble gestures to shape what remains into a marvelous bird. It would have been fine with me to know only enough of grief to…

An insane bald homeless white man on a children’s bicycle rode over to where my girlfriend and I were walking and he said, “Couldn’t find a real woman?” My girlfriend is black. Okay, tell me—what does one do in this situation? The man must have been at least sixty, but he was very muscular, wearing…

That’s a cute-looking girl there in the sports section. A little flat-chested, but pretty. The caption says: “Bubba Day follows through on his way to victory in the Insurance Classic.” Wait a minute, is that a typo? No, what I thought was a mistake is really the truth. Her ponytail is really his bicep on…

In the mind there comes a moment when shadows fall back    like men from a gust of something, when the brain is light as a fly on your wrist— and in the jeweled eyes of that fly you see your own six-legged self white-shoed, dancing, being on parade— the gold tuba grown from your…

There is a danger in living; it is why we file our nails instead of our wrists; it is why we label things away. It’s why when we think of mass transit we think of concentration camps, we think of people packed like oysters in the little shells we’re allowed, the brine & hope of…

Polymorphous perverse, dolphins of both genders prefer sex-play with the human female. 1. Water begins from a wound in the hillside, a tear in the     clouds. There’s a tin cup no one cares has years of germs on its     icy rim. The water is sweeter than anything you will ever hold in    …

When we thought of the future it was wonderful & well-lit. The sky could hold anything. He chants about Beelzebub, Black Arnie & his mismatched angels, about supplicants & warblers that always tag along: a talisman against the learning the church leaves out. He is on one leg & braced, a shout that ignores its…