Poetry

A man in the south of France flaps his elbows and dances with a female crane, who is the last of the Black-tails. He hoots and coos, and she lowers her long delicate neck. Yesterday the man had sunned and swum amid a swarm of nude swimmers in the Riviera’s cloudy waters, so that now…

When the first radio wave music escaped Earth’s ionosphere, it literally did become eternal. Music, in this century, has been converted from sound into the clarity of pure light. Radio has superseded the constraints of space. —Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics Imagine Vivaldi suddenly falling on the ears of a woman somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri,…

Somebody almost walked off with all my stuff               —Ntozake Shange at best you can say your judgment was tainted by movies and old expectations       Paris equals passion       n’est pas?   so why not ride                         the subway just this one                         night despite                         all the echoes of caution                         dancin :…

Because we suspect ourselves, knowing what we’re capable of, knowing how thin the veneer, wanting to control what gets away from us even now, with restraints wrists, ankles, our chastity belted down so we can save ourselves for and from. Because in our visions our best moments we all speak forbidden languages. Because if anyone…

on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—wheels of the train clacking and clicking I wish it could be rhythm on a drum or church piano something for the folks to remember of working men & Mr. McCorkle Redcap porter dishwasher peach brown lemon yaller black tall and fat working men with those smoking & sweet smelling…

“Obscenity” is often not an expression by an individual uttered under great stress and condemned as bad taste, but one permitted and even prescribed by society. —E. E. Evans-Pritchard, British social anthropologist, 1925 Among the Ba-Ila (“among” as if swarming the petri dish of the British Imperialist), there exist expressions used collectively, that is, in…

Like that answer written on a trip that after makes no sense, we remember before birth, but cannot force it to the clumsy breath of this wet hurt of a joy we are now. So let that big boy go and find your tribe to ride with. We spilled the apple juice long ago. I…

How, in summer, a man and woman, as in Paris, embrace under trees, and the leaves and the grass bend back and sweat amends them, in a park where the squirrels eat well, where the bronze horse could heave off its officer. How it is like water, sex in summer. You cover yourself, your leaves…

Peeking for hours into the fire, I find the faces staring back— marching cities rise and fall. Still as stone I sit, practicing death. My machine of flesh hangs lightly. Our body’s noise keeps us sleeping. Later we arise into dreams, and awake to Jacob’s ladder. At death we graduate. There the slow-mo stomp of…