Poetry

When you were first born, your eyes were blue and you couldn't see but what you felt was real. In the crib you screamed against the bars and no one came and that was knowing. The milk pale blue from the mother's breast shone through your new skin. A lode of fear and hiding place…

I was happy once for nine days. My housekeeper found a novena for hopeless cases on her seat in church, a prayer to be recited every day for nine days, and she thought she might as well say it for me since I had been complaining of hard times. She apologized for calling me a…

The sun widening its skirt, catching the trail the ducks leave as they glide across the water . . . if you belived. . . widening until it's made a window in the wall of cloud, an opening between this world and that other made wholly of light, which we must take on faith.      On…

Fifteen feet from shore a seal's pug head, then slick cigar body jerks up, vanishes under the surface as your voice rises this is why we're here isn't it? Something I forget often and with great accuracy. Until the world jars me— this seal, or, night after the lunar eclipse, when we sailed under a…

Now my friend is among the dying who pace Commercial Street, jeans bunched at his ass & hung from skeletal legs. Flesh shrinks & shrinks away, until it seems only his bones promenade the street. I have averted my eyes from his eyes. I have stared straight in as his eyes sink further back &…

At the end there were straws in her glove compartment, I’d split them open to taste the familiar bitter residue, near the end I ate all her Percodans, hungry to know how far they could take me. A bottle of red wine each night moved her along as she wrote, I feel too much, again…

When I am dead with you, fastened up, enameled, dried on a hot stone and dropped in a well to float with the other dead, not knowing them, not knowing any name or step or skin, when I am part of Law with you, and have the terror of restless movement worn away, so that…

He reads my latest attempt at a poem and is silent for a long time, until it feels like that night we waited for Apollo, my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking, Haven't they landed yet? At last Dugan throws it on the table and says, This reads like a cheap detective…

Old hands take her infant eyes. Her hair comes to the razor, lips and teeth retreat, her fingers snap, her legs and arms and tongue unsocket. So the bed is dry of flesh. The bones are whispered to. The sister by the window etches hairlines, pulls the blue thread through the handbones, footbones, boils a…