Poetry

At first the angel was perfectly wingless, loitering out in the meadow below our summer place, gazing up at the sky. A kind of Christina without a home behind her. Whenever she was hungry, she’d sneak into our home and steal an apple or a peach from the walnut bowl. Once she cracked a tooth…

Pleasure is the widow, circulating. She walks and her dress unfolds like a stream folds in clear seams. The bright willow streams down the bank. Where she walks the stream flashes bright windows, a creed of windows. She weeps through the river and the changing flower of foam. Pleasure is the widow. So some pleasure…

The bloom was off the economic recovery. “I just want to know one thing,” she said. What was that one thing? He’ll never know, Because at just that moment he heard the sound Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there, It was dark. His hand went to the wall But the…

   Ethna and I were eating scones and sipping espresso at the Café Arabica when I learned of my love affair with you. Everyone has been talking about it, though it came as news to me. Good news. I had no trouble believing every word of it.    True, I have no idea what you…

Hovering in the air were two luminous shapes. They turned, balanced in a pose of surrender. Water poured out into the lower world, through channels unsolved by busy rats, tides, and fish. Then a phrase of music is misheard, and the green Orpheus descends, striking the prison bars of the sky like a lyre as…

His first infidelity was a mistake, but not as big As her false pregnancy. Later, the boy found out He was born three months earlier than the date On his birth certificate, which had turned into A marriage license in his hands. Had he been trapped In a net, like a moth mistaken for a…

There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…

Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…

Recent downpour, the black streets glisten, the red and white bus dips down like a sail into the runoff pooled near the tram tracks. Fifteen stories above, I drink beer, floating in my own sea—the smell of mushrooms frying in the kitchen—while the dark spike of the Palace of Culture fades into the blackness of…