Up there my father marches off into Guadalcanal, Guam, his face numb from lying in the green tub to break the 105-degree malarial fever. My brother is there, too, Mae Westing over Okinawa until they gather him up and place him in the nineteenth bunk, tenth floor of the Albany Veterans' Hospital. Behind them a…
I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack's caress, dry and soft. I enter the soft birth-lips of the…
When I walk home with groceries, the child shifts back against my belly, moving with the eggs in their twelve jiggling sockets. I try to have a sense of beauty. This is my true voice I want moving among others and yet it has a rhythm of its own, the possible, the cries of…
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…
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