Poetry

  • Dinner in the Fall

    Partially green leaves are falling on Camille’s Italian restaurant where grapes tint our lips, and the linens are more inviting than our bed. Our eyes shine like the blue glaze on our plates. Heat radiates through the shale of my spine now suddenly recalling the black bitter chill of deep sea as if my body…

  • The House We Pass Through

    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…

  • Analogue

    . . . 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…

  • Phoenix

    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…

  • Love

    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…

  • Backswing

    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…

  • The Gust

    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…

  • Secrets of Water

    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    …