Poetry

. . .by the barbarous king So rudely forced —Eliot, “The Waste Land” Aunt Phil was no fin de siècle brooched-up elegant with one eye always on the karat though she was almost married to several goose- bottomed men. I begin where the last had the balls to jilt her. She'd even put down a…

It turns out that I was supposed to eat the blue Hubbard squash I got for Christmas, lung-shaped refugee from the winter closing of the farm market, relic of a profligate ambition. My friend tied a red ribbon around its stem, and I thought it was dying, so I mourned it. I found a place…

You know what it's like Sundays to wash, brush your teeth, pull on pants and sneakers then amble to the grocery a few blocks away for juice, milk, bagels, then carry them back, make coffee, toast—you know it. But the box of rats sitting on the counter as I left seemed all wrong, cruel, what's…

When Letitia stretches out on the couch after a hard day and tries, in vain, to teach her cat to walk back and forth across her belly, she decides enough is enough. I can't do everything myself. She imagines inventing a machine of hands which stands by the door like a hat rack waiting for…

Skin deep, you son of a bitch, I thought, no more—but the impure Tip of his needle tracked its dance. The snake between the ribs, Anchor, tiger, the daggered heart, memento mori of the skull: In the heat of the body's refusal,                                                            I had to choose among images. Beyond the window, awl-points…

but about death and women I've never known enough to really say, to help myself, to resolve, define, understand, to hear the voices crying, muttering, cursing in their endless soliloquy the subjectless theme of women, death, the source of all anxiety, the root I need to see, inspect, touch, Henderson lay his hand on the…

Seventy degrees on the winter solstice,      a yule moon sifting through ragged clouds into the undersides of trees      —lamplit, pearly gray—like the bellies of huge snails whose branchy horns test      whatever it is the winter birds sail in on—or, not birds,      but the wings we were meant to put on later that same night—I knew…

Suddenly disappears. Flows into a crowd, into a subway from which she'll refuse to emerge. The reporter will write: “She plunged into the crowd at the annual summer festival and never returned. The children found their way to their father alone.” She does not die. She does not desire the father, mother, even the sister…

My house full of chrysanthemums trying to continue. They stand in dry dirt, expecting something of me, sun or shade, I don't know which. If I knew enough about life to find a good place for them they'd come back again. How brave. The refrigerator's full of eggs, slick and mottled. Mute as violets. A…