Poetry

  • 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…

  • In the Belly

    Dad pays him to teach me the boy thought as the old man watched from behind jib— The cool burnt cherry from his pipe sweetened the ocean smell, its spoilage and cure of brine. On tack or coming about, the man was practical, oracular: Weight the gunwale on close hauls. Don't luff. He read out…