Poetry

  • Living Color

                     At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink;      the gray walls behind the silent faces                        shimmer, and next the sound's turned up, the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving—                              is this…

  • Learning to Drive

    —Here, Dad laughs and I shoot my arm straight out into Sunday. Sax-honks rock the radio. I wheel this Chevy in sunlight, roll off onto a long, disappearing country road. In the rearview a cloud of our best summer is pouring up behind. —Easy, he says. Easy. It goes forever. He's here to show me…

  • After Melville

    1. Do you pay any rent? Do you pay any taxes? Is this property yours? —I know where I am Do you own a set of keys? Is the lease in your name? Is the deed in your name? —I know where I am What right have you to remain here? —I know where I…

  • Going Into Moonlight

    I didn't intend to walk the old road at midnight but there I was, surprised to see my faint shadow on the dirt. I looked up to that open moon coming down through all the mist. A few more steps and there lay my shadow across a jack rabbit dead on the road. I whispered…

  • At Nightfall

    Like held lanterns, wavering, almost gone out, the cows' white faces turn towards me as their bodies pivot, needles to magnetic north. Squared off, they still, and stare. I can barely make out the nostrils' dilation trying to forage my scent from the currents of air, or the draped-velvet black of their coats, its crushed…

  • Monika and the Owl

    In a paint-speckled smock Monika is cutting cheese, her short, sparrow-colored hair falling forward. From the barn kitchen window, she doesn't see the owl on a branch turning its head side to side. Gazing at the wall, she considers the line between figurative and real. the willed silences of art. She wants distilled meanings and…

  • Glossary: A Deconstruction

    It was torture. A manner of speaking that anyone might fall into after a hard walk in the woods, say, or a day's labor in sunlight, bone-wracking cold. Or concerning that day in the schoolyard years ago when an older boy twisted your arm behind your back until something cracked, and you said what you…

  • Absentee Landlord

    A dog's bark breaks the December ten-degree weather, a bitter dark space bleaching into a voweled ache that staccatos the thin wind, fuzzes into consciousness as a hurt. A cry ballooning in the surface of things, it's like the residue of city air left in the lung, while you search these suspenseful streets— the houses,…