Poetry

  • Ah

    Through an open window of late summer evening a woman cries, Ah-ah-AH! Neighbors pause, blush perhaps, then go on with their homely chores, smiling to themselves. What do you do with this—another’s shameless, lonely ecstasy? Or your own? I put a tape of Mozart on to cover our confusion.

  • The Jogger

    For six months each day at sunrise I’ve watched a woman in bright red trunks run past my window and each time I think of how as a boy I took my stance in front of the steamed mirror, my faded boxers safety-pinned proudly at the crotch and judged my body against all things that…

  • A Winter Affair

    Love that arrives too late, untimely Eros stumbles in after the fall has done its worst, and winter fills the world with distance and with snowfall far as hearts can feel. Four crows creak in the cedar boughs, symbols that signify themselves alone since everything is what it only seems, the least version of a…

  • 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—…