Poetry

  • The Death of Shelley

    A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats’s poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the…

  • Rising Bodies

    On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has been…

  • Armistice

    Not far from San Diego steel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopened and someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my window suspended in this moment between breathing out and     breathing in the men and women at Camp Pendleton relax their arms…

  • 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…