Poetry

i My father knocked my mother up early in March, maybe it was late February. Had it been a leap year my conception might have been miraculous. But, no, it was the year of the Ram. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had not yet died and my home, one of seven islands, was still a territory, not…

That from the seed of men No man, And from the seed of the olive tree No olive tree Shall grow, This must be measured With the yardstick of death. Those who live Beneath the earth In cement spheres, Their strength is A blade of grass Lashed by snow. The desert is history. Termites write…

for Jean Paul Neveu We don’t have a language for endings, for the collapse of love, for the intense labyrinths of dying, for the silenced scandal of irrevocable cave-ins. How can we say to the one who abandons us or to the one we abandon that to add another absence to absence is to drown…

rare, the blood still dripping forget custards or tapioca pudding my mother wants what's red and rare some thing to get her teeth in no washed out color but like her recent tastes for emerald green and royals and ruby suits and red striped pajamas my mother wants to devour the barely cooked red flesh…

Satellites document a shift in an ant colony. A spy joins a circus—a clown leaps from a bridge. A prima ballerina loses consciousness after sharing a recreational drug called Ecstasy with a steeplejack. Both dream of snakes but the snakes swallow each other and there is not a trace of all this. I am in…

1. The situation is not going to change. Which situation? Anecdote of the moon. Held there, cast in a blitz of lopsided gas. Or say a row of trash cans. Something set to music, then lost. Four wasps on a sill; some stench. The last thing said. Say that. The smoke inert. Leaves Frozen at…

something to get her teeth in forget the shakes cancer patients are supposed to choose forget tapioca pudding. vanilla ice she wants what is full of blood something to chew to get the red color out of something she can attack fiercely my mother who never was namby-pamby never held her tongue never didn't attack…

Sometimes she calls me Chance and sometimes she calls me Desire. I was coming out of the laundromat wearing my little Graceland hat. What most astounded me on this particular day was the day itself, my being alive against such confusion, my being erect, one could almost say, as opposed to crawling all around the…

The first black sheet lies on the pond. The nursegirl takes us to search for her brother. At first her glass eye frightens, but as we stare at birch and dogwood night exposes itself and we can't see her anyway. We find the brother in the weeds smoking Pall Malls. She takes a stick and…