Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville, Umbrian sackcloth, stigmata and Stabat mater, A sleep and a death away, Night, and a sleep and a death away— Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here, aureate, beehived, Falling in Heraclitean streams Through my neighbor’s maple trees. There’s nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town, October…
In order for a rapprochement with the physical body Only necromancy could be behind it. Racked on a stretcher the I.V. tubes string me up like a cello without a player Only necromancy could be behind it. These days of horse-drawn betrayal. Like a cello without a player I’m caught, a crown of thorns,…
But later, to teach myself humility I worked exclusively with breath, with the insubstantial, with what does not last, not leave a record behind those streamers, those ribbons we trail from our bodies banners, flags of the living excrement of the mouth and lungs, though we do not like to think that the spirit is…
October in mission creep, autumnal reprise and stand down. The more reality takes shape, the more it loses intensity— Synaptic uncertainty, Electrical surge and quick lick of the minus sign, Tightening of the force field Wherein our forms are shaped and shapes formed, wherein we pare ourselves to our attitudes . . ….
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Though it’s common belief That Susan Smith willed me alive At the moment Her babies sank into the lake When called, I come. My job is to get things done. I am piecemeal. I make my living by taking…
Probably God laughs at us, down here, entranced As, to quiet us, He tosses down another season, And we ooh and ah—like infants silenced By the jangling of keys above a playpen— At the all-effacing green or white or gold, Or even something small: a stem, a robin, A brittle smattering of stars across a…
translated from the Ukrainian by Lisa Sapinkopf and the author It could be dawn. The light, crumpled like sheets. The ashtray full. A shadow multiplies on four walls. The room is empty. No witnesses. But someone was here. A moment ago twin tears shimmered On polished wood (Did a couple live here?) In the armchair…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Susan Smith has invented me because Nobody else in town will do what She needs me to do. I mean: jump in an idling car And drive off with two sad and Frightened kids in the back. Like a bad…
In Mexico we danced on the edge where the saguaro cacti stood up like billboards of cactus in the Persian blue twilight of Tucson— ah, the desert in bloom lizards with space-gear helmets on our sill and we in our deck chairs taking the winter sun! Nothing to do but listen to wind in…
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