Poetry

Monkey Boy

I lift my hands to my face      my hand's the biggest thing around and filled with rivers      it has stems I can see through to the dark fuzzy air I hold my hand to my face and down below I feel my legs curl up to my chest I look out at the door of…

Choose

Wanting, the enemy cast off, wades in a dark pool outside. Wanting, the oppressor, grows anklets and beads in a wet heat. Charity, the curse in love with patriots, gives all her possessions to the night, takes off her robes and waits on the narrow bed for ruin. The slightest cusp of wind disturbing both…

Twenty-One Turkeys

Twenty-one turkeys amaze our eyes, come traveling north from the Berkshire Museum (Art and Natural History). It says there boa constrictors do not harm humans. False Laocoön! not to mention Eden.      On Route 7 nobody stops; but if they had a gun (or a camera in Yellowstone) they'd stop to shoot the hideous buffalo. Turkeys…

Ethics of the Fathers

Eat a third, drink a third, and leave a third for anger. And after waking rise slowly. And after lovemaking rise slowly. And after too much wine rise slowly. And after bloodletting rise slowly. We rise slowly after silence, taking a breath at a time. After days bent over the garden, slight comment about our…

In the Hospital

She sits in her strong middle age Near his white and iron cage And bites her lip, hearing him moan. She cannot make her strength his own. She cannot answer to the call Of that deep voice. When he was small, O red-faced cry that she could still! O groping mouth that she could fill!…

All Happy Families

I. The fields are frozen, swart rows banded white with ribbons of ice, each a horizon planted with a sun. The station wagon's old back end takes the ruts shocklessly, waking everyone, even the potential son- in-law whose carousing late last night merited a bowed-head-in-hands. The light scissoring at him, however, is not unexpected. “If…

Cleaning Smelt

Snipped at the neck— tangerine roe, milky innards, their mouths jerked open for a final sentence. One bowl of guts and eyes, one of their stiff, edible bodies. The baby inside me bolts. “Off with their heads, off with their heads.” My three-year-old marches the kitchen keen for dinner. She pauses only for a vase…