Poetry

I want to erase your footprints from my walls. Each pillow is thick with your reasons. Omens fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman in a party hat, clinging to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, “Stop!” and I close my eyes. I can't watch as this town slowly…

When you pretended to shoot me on your porch with a gun I couldn't see I saw something in you that embarrassed me and the yellow light in your house seemed to illuminate only your room as if there wasn't enough of it to spread into the heart under the stairs to distinguish something other…

From the manger strewn with fake straw, from pinched nerves of adolescence— that gangling second birth of the body— it grew as I grew, a girl watching the stained-glass fish from the choir stall, ichthys in the Methodist church, a small triangular hole in its belly revealing the gravel parking lot, a red metallic swatch…

I keep forgetting how to enter the other world how to stay floating into the periphery after I have decided on earth. One key is in the garden of language and this morning, after the vague stars and cars of night have turned back into the everyday, I am reading as the way to enter…

To give thanks, after all, for disasters survived, the Mexican artists painted on tin or wood precise scenes of disaster—the crushed bus spilling passengers like pickup sticks, the stillborn child being lifted from the bed, the dancer propped in a plastic corset. Somewhere in the picture—a radiant wheel or a saint's face—was an inkling of…

The motel pool wasn't flat as safety. It gleamed like a twisted muscle under an operating room light in Oyster Bay. 1966. I'm fourteen. From my room I hear a machine buzz at night through the smell of chlorine. I don't know what it does. I lie in bed imagining it forces the gravity into…

Water, bone, bed, bedrock— whatever is underneath, below what's below. Sudden touchable quiet, shadow of a shadow. Weather. Sadness turning ordinary. Nameless illness coming on. A knock at the door so gentle it could be anything. Distance. The just thing not said, or said too late or said exactly and without mercy. Wind rising. Whatever…

Day off in dark suit & hat, looking though the viewfinder of a new eight-millimeter Bell & Howell camera, paying no mind the open windows, the seizure. Just how more than half the targets on the grassy knoll are potential customers, models, women, how accident & aim could fit them all, including the car, into…

Not that you were too young to die, though thirty-five is too young, and not because they killed you in the middle of the night the most premeditated way. Not exactly that you didn't deserve it, either, having shot an old man to death for his rare coins and wasted another for money whose sister-in-law…