Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned. We hungry generations with our question Of shapes and changes: Did you think we wanted To be like you? I flicker and for a second I'm picking through rubbish To salvage your half-eaten muffin, one hand At my ear to finger a…
I hear her splintering like the seed inside the pine cone, the furious grease inside the smoke and speed of the fire of our bodies. The hard red seed of her, her pink nipple, her penis-husk, her odors and hairs, her molecular dust, her dream file, her first and last word, her undiscussed déjà vu's,…
Just yesterday afternoon I heard a man Say he lived in a house with no windows The door of which was locked on the outside. This was at a party in New York, New York. A deep Oriental type, I said to myself, One of them indescribable Tebootans who Habitate on Quaker Heights and drink…
Today I returned To see those two worn-out and rumpled Representatives of the common world (Were they mother and son, Or did they merely resemble each other?) Kneeling in adoration Before the elongated Mannerist Apparition of the Virgin Bearing a chubby five-year-old Son of God Out of her sacred house And into the world As…
. . .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…
No products in the cart.