Poetry

Little chameleon swooning for a tin pot of old water, you remind me of our worst lieutenant generals, balancing on tiptoes, yanked tall and then swollen with greed, curling their thick tongues like hoodwinked nooses down into the blue bowl— the color of tricky sky, of well-traveled ocean glass, the last emptied bottle tossed overboard—…

Not the one he's wearing in that stopped length of ground, but the one we saw together in the little shop in Oregon—moss agate so green it was nearly black on its silver band. Hard to come across it after, emptied of his hand and watchful. Thinking to surprise its power with treason, I gave…

He said he'd meet me at the theater, and since the boy in the ticket booth knew Elvis bought all the seats for the late show, he didn't bother to ask if I was Elvis's date or to notice I was the pretty face on all the magazine covers the girls he was too afraid…

For my son I tried to distinguish      between personal fear and principle. Now laughter phlegms deep in my throat because I remember the tenuous mud dam      in the marsh, only surface tension holding back the black water, and the sleek beaver      gliding with a mouthful of sedge and sapling back to the lodge and her…

As the soft green of moss covers the gnarled roots of an old banyan, so evening creeps over the folds of my grandparents. Veiled by the dusk from the hurting brilliance of a young world, they sit in undisturbed stillness on garden chairs, side by side. Many who come to see their son, or their…

This miserable scene demands a groan. —John Gay Frankly, I don't care if the billionaire is getting divorced and thus boosting the career of his girlfriend, a “model/spokesperson” with no job and nothing to promote; nor does my concern over celebrity X undergoing surgical procedures leaked as “primarily cosmetic,” if it can be measured quantitatively,…

in memory of Alfred Satterthwaite 1. Leave the doors open, the poet says, the whole house open all night, so we may die a little here, in us, and there in him we live a little. Before anyone died here this house stood open. I could see from the darkness Isabel and her sister shelling…

Of all the questions I have been lucky enough to ask, the riskiest, & the one most laughable, wants to know whose feelings are just like my own. Which could easily be a way of asking whose are not. And worse, some feelings, some of my feelings, are like those soft scented brushes flourished hastily…

“. . . and another workshop, since my last letter, at the mental hospital. No, they don't pay me. Several good writers, but it's sad (the locks). A man said he'd killed his cousin. A young girl, Sarah, tremulous, with electric hair, said, ‘I was thinking about good and evil, in the cafeteria. All I…