Poetry

Since my chronic bad luck Vanished in my love’s deck of cards, I step around them softly, I won’t open the window on windy days. I unpin her long black hair And strip down her dress myself, Lest their flutter stirs the dead air And make the cards fly. I tell her, Don’t even think…

When my grandfather turned ninety we had a party in a restaurant in Harlem called Copeland’s. Harlem restaurants are always dim to dark and this was no exception. Daddy would have gone downtown but Baba, as we called him, wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and this place was “swanky.” We picked him up in…

The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children.     A few nights ago A man swears he saw me pump gas With the children At a convenience store Like a punchline you get the next day, Or a kiss in a dream that returns while You’re in the middle…

My chicken soup thickened with pounded young almonds. My blend of winter greens. Dearest tagliatelle with mushrooms, fennel, anchovies, Tomatoes and vermouth sauce. Beloved monkfish braised with onions, capers And green olives. Give me your tongue tasting of white beans and garlic, Sexy little assortment of formaggi and frutta. I want to drown with you…

Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again where my back should go until she had made a small tight square of my chest, a knot of socks where my feet blossomed into toes, a stack of denim from the waist down, my panties strictly packed into the size…

Three days of spring winter and suddenly, birds everywhere. The sky and garden are not enough for them. They beat upon the pane of glass through which I watch them, wanting entrance. It was wrong to think that they were happier than I, or that nothing was denied them, when I, myself, had shut them…

This morning a hawk plunges straight for the squirrel at my feeder and leaves only its signature: blood on the snow. All morning it circled the yard, then dove, stunning itself on the glass sky of my window, and in minutes returned, braving the thin, perilous channel between hedgerow and house. I was watching its…

A faint afterglow of red behind the hills, and the tops of the pine trees are all mist and woodsmoke now. Up the darkening headwaters of a little trib, the swifts give way to bats. Nobody’s going to find you, no one is even looking. Time measured in the tick of insects against the screened-in…

A secret like a lodestar, a ball of pure lead, I thought about tasting him long enough for a life to wither, a new planet to come into view. I imagined the smell of his genitals, so common, so indescribable. Wyoming and summer. Thunderheads galloping in a stark yellow light. Or puffball clouds white as…