Poetry

Had it worked well even once? Can one point to a golden age of good times? Whatever the case, the arms decided at last to separate themselves. They were not like the others; they had their own tastes and ambitions: pleasures the others could never appreciate. The legs went next, alleging a life of agony…

He will tell you how each day wears the impress of childhood fields, where he was made to kneel and harvest darkness, then extract its most pure element, which his father used on his mother with rags, like chloroform. This is the most you will get. He has no notch or opening primed for release,…

1. For five days in October, Carlos died. He could get himself up, up to the last. I’m fine, he said, so I left him alone. I went shopping, but then, when I got home, He was dead, stiff, dressed in the three-piece suit We’d bought at Penney’s for his laying-out, And lying curled like…

Like a dream, which when one becomes conscious of it becomes a confusion, so her name slipped between the vacancies. As little more than a child I hurried among a phalanx of rowdy boys across a dance floor— such a clattering of black shoes. Before us sat a row of girls in pastel dresses waiting….

“That was in another life,” we say. Everyone knows what that means— another love, in another country. “In another life, when I drank chartreuse, densely herbal, fresh green on my tongue, the light filtering through new rainwater fell on a face, beside a café window. . . .” I hear about another’s other life which…

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,     mi prese del constui piacer sì forte,     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. —Dante Is this hell, where neighbors will try to burn us out? To clear the woods one doused a cat in gasoline And let her run afire through…

I am not— opened or closed— what you expected, o heart. Or would you without me have thought to throw open the flooding and roar, to step through the lion’s gold pelt? have thought that the passionate glass is the body? and this life, the one life you wanted? Wanted, meaning neither lacked, nor desired,…

“She propped her false leg up in the corner . . .” my spiritual advisor says when a strong man comes into the room you flutter your eyelashes & hike up your skirts when a strong man commands your heart flutters skips a beat and you do as you wish ghandi and dr king called…

As if the porous bag had been dipped once, twice, once more in the summer’s water, then set aside. Halfway between sleep and waking, I took it between my lips. And though the earth is everywhere terrible and cruel, the heart diamond flashed out once, twice, and once again the semaphore-reply it cannot help but…