Poetry

  • Cousins

    Figs & plums & stolen Red apples were sour When weighed against your body In the kitchen doorway Where July Shone through your flowered dress Worn thin by a hundred washings. Like colors & strength Boiled out of cloth, Some deep & tall smell Made the daylilies cower In early evening. Where did the wordless…

  • Peanut Butter

    I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know….

  • Quintet in C Major

    I think you are my son now that I see the stalwart light on your hair, layers of composition, plucked cello wrist, bear down the spine I gave birth to, wracked note and sheet of clearest music, pitch, scale the beating trout under your areole, halo of rainbow, pleat the dear earth of your waist,…

  • Block

    Right up there this side the Five Chimneys Corners      about a mile south the Oneida line, this goddamn granddaddy sugar maple block I tell you it's      what you might call a real out-size block a old-time ball-busting son of a bitch of a block laying by the side      the road where that house with the…

  • The Wrong Street

    If you could shuck your skin and watch The action from a safe vantage point You might find a weird beaty in this, An egoless moment, but for These young white men at your back. Your dilemma is how to stay away from That three to five second shot On the evening news of the…

  • Ave

    You raise your face to kiss me in public— we've never done this! Women before mah-jong customarily press lips, or after a long ordeal—war, torture, childbirth—will lift their countenance to drink that gladness and risk of another woman. So Eve, drawn backwards, kisses her image, water, before the Strong Arm of the Law leads her…

  • Fleur

    No, it is not suffering that engenders it;      it is beyond suffering, The Flower—      though it rests beside the tears, the million barricades,      fusillade upon fusillade . . . it rests,      soft as a fontanel: the poultice,      the mother of all fragrance, The Mother      ceaselessly whispering without tenderness, we fashion hell, we fashion      incoherence. *     *     …

  • Dental Hygiene

    The dentist looks At my broken mouth The way I'd look At a child who Innocently yells The word “Nigger” Then smiles, a baby Jesus. Is there an alibi For this? That's What I hear beneath Those weekly sighs. Poverty? Child abuse? Look at this, he sighs And gives me The Yiddish word For dirt,…

  • Moral Theology

    Adultery is wrong because injustice is done to the beloved. Fucking has nothing to do with it. We don't fuck, anyway. Winging it, maybe, Lilith to Eve. This is stern stuff: the boundaries breaking your voice, your mouth on my mind—wildfire eyes! The sisters are doing it for themselves, uh-huh, un-huh, Aretha sings. belts out…