Poetry

—from the Inuit tale The Man Who Was a Mother A man and a woman couldn’t have any children. No one knew whose fault it was. This couple was unhappy and the butt of jokes. The man sucked on his wife’s breasts. The woman cradled her husband in her arms. But pretending about babies wasn’t…

There was rain which soon turned To snow and no place we had in mind We wanted to go so we stayed in bed And made love all afternoon . . . As the lamps lit the street We got up from each other Because there was money to be made Because we did not…

He eats in silence as frost plumes at the panes and stars tighten, teeth marks on the freezing sky. His boots stand in snow water, melting by the wood stove that he burns hot to husk his legs of cold. The fire bumps, drops, cracks in the stove. His wife and daughters’ talk goes louder…

I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day’s news, the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don’t trust to keep my children safe. What was I…

My aunt was upset by lesbians: Her sister, her sister’s lover, in particular. She imagined them, I think, giving each other Head over and over, though from what I knew —And I knew plenty—that couple made love With roughly the same frequency As did Auntie and Uncle Snort. They All had plenty to worry about,…

for R. Voisine His father, two brothers, and me, we turned off our saws for a rest of water and cake. Thirsty, he stopped, walked over and the loader’s back gate yawned and slipped its catch, threw him down onto a fresh stump, still that pink-white wet. I scooped him up. Blood fell on the…

Still I am not sure which is most vivid— the love now risen from its previous absence, or the future loss it rides like a shadow, the eye’s after-image of a bright light gone. In any case, with its harrowing blades, this fertile line of love already draws through me a beautiful symmetry: The invisible,…

For one thing I’m glad the goal of enlightenment means being so utterly stupid as to actually slip out the door every morning & live. With no second-guessings, no poses, just this leaning & slouching the experts term hope. Because people like me aren’t guilty of laughing at the passing streets. I mean I believe…

Already pregnant, she writes her name and his, Lou and Mike, over the cloudy pictures in True Stories. Black-and-white pictures of a leggy woman (Lou) draped, the arching stem of her throat almost tears from her head, so thrown back with pounds of hair and a dark man’s (Mike’s) kisses. Done eating,  Mike scrubs the…