Poetry

  • Jet

    Sometimes I wish that I was still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids…

  • Where Everything Is When

    The June humid stars puff above the living giving our street the delicate shade of a sad mirror given to dark compulsion. How strange everything is when everything is so simple. The people of our street pace the spotlit sidewalks, they so not speak, they wait like patients wait for loved ones gone, gone. We…

  • Self-Improvement

    Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until…

  • Creepy About Being

    I’m hanging out and on, on a froggy Saturday with my friends Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and So On, stimulisting in the O room, motivated by the jukebox of haunted songs. Here, when it gets dark, it gets very late and as cold as the sibyled voice invented by insomnia, in the pseudonymous syntax used by…

  • Gertrude’s Ear

        A sow rooting around in a garden uncovered a silk purse.     “Oh Good Heavens!” she squealed in horror. “That’s Gertrude’s ear!”     Another sow trotted over, and stared at the soiled object.     “No, no,” she concluded, with a relieved snuffle. “That can’t be Gertie’s ear. Gertie’s ear didn’t have a clasp.”  …

  • Flush

    Not sure what to leave in, I begin with Jenny, her sister and me at the anchor of our great mall, Sears: We stuff cassettes down her crooked spine’s brace, and stroll through our mother’s aisle (lifting douches), into the store ladies’ room where we fill the drooping bags at taps that keep running. Past…

  • Crèche

    Would you know a saint if you saw one? Say you’re on the delivery table, legs drawn up For each agonizing push, while everyone else is poised To welcome forth your frightened protégée— When, instead, a smiling light slowly issues out From your dark interior, assembling itself Like a mirage hovering above the linoleum floor—…

  • A Dry Wake for Ex

    Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library’s neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: “His failure was his greatest success,” says “Milestones” in Time magazine: “Died—Frederick Exley.” And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned fact, and I feel it: Brain- muddled, maybe, but still functional—pulse flushes…