Poetry

Following Her to Sleep

My friend wears boots to sleep so that I might learn her path. I know the way now. The room is as silent as a child in a closet. I hang this notion from an instrument of hindsight where it rocks at the appropriate moment like fortune's cube on a string. My neighbor with no…

The Wish

In fourth grade Gabe Acosta and Jamie Hunter promised me they would bring a noose to school and hang me from a specific bough in the recess field. They told me I was a fairy and that fairies belonged in heaven. They each then tweaked my ear lobes, and I could only smile at them…

Possession

Steal your sister's presents. Swallow pieces, ride her bike, ride it far into the grove. Show her you've discovered all her holy spots and watch her try to find another, deeper forest: everything she's kept from you is yours now: these frilly private things, this tiny book of screams.

Technology

The sink's dishes are the sink's problem as I ooh and aah at the complexity of balance implicit to keep the structure: eight glasses, thirteen bowls, a valley of forks, intact, while I run hot water over a knife for my onion. There's a science to the bathtub's archipelago of grunge colonies that's necessary to…

Without Gloves

My sister and I are fighting as always in dreams, our faces an inch apart. She's angry because I'm fat, and I because she speaks what I already know without kindness.      On the counter: carving knives and platters (perhaps Mother's) (perhaps Mother's dead in the cabinet) and these distract us—what should we do? Don't pick…

For Joseph Cornell

Not to arrive and not to ever know how to arrive or how to live even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens. This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes and for time that moves like a silent film through a projector and for the eyelids of the blind and for those…

Conduct of Our Loves

There's kind of sky below the ocean— a field of starfish, turning slowly like cogs inside a water-watch, wound by a sea river; the star's five fingers tremble and reach for a clam's book of meat, into which it will inject a sedative and then its stomach. In The City, escaped parrots colonize a hilltop…