Poetry

  • 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…

  • Glory

    The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary…

  • 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…