Poetry

Coming from the wings, he leapt onto the raised opera-set built to lift his libretto—ten years of work— into the national atmosphere of fanfare, and he missed: down on his stomach, pasted prone, a spread-eagled grunt, and a gasp from the audience that sucked up applause for the two or three seconds it took him…

The noose rests lightly on the lamp Restraining No     engaging it to memorize these details that charisma drawn from the well of a broken circle

Ripsaw whine across the picture dome of day dividing blue from blue: the steady Munch-like scream of Flight 630's engines as we sat there minute after minute on the runway trapped, until I saw my broken body kicked & pitching forward, one more dead American sure he was going someplace else, dumped instead onto the…

The wet sand yields like the wall of a womb—pliant, enveloping each jog with particular resistance. Sand dollars and crab legs, the glittering dead cod, lie in line plotting the neap. The sand's a fine spot for ends. It conforms. Waves slip in it beating themselves to foam. A drag extends. Gutted by gulls, a…

The square was almost deserted I held my fear like a knife Sharp but ineffectual Like keys clenched in a fist The square was almost deserted Except for the punks and the moon Except for the taste of desire Cold as an ice cream cone Covered in chocolate sprinkles A girl called out my name…

Late August, and the pond is holding the summer's heat close to shore where leaf-litter has begun to form; even out at the center of things there are pockets of warmth deep beneath a canoe short-roped to a slab of scrap iron heaved into place once again on a scrub-topped boulder barely covered by water….

Borrowing his grandfather's reading glass the boy next door takes time to educate us, summoning us for safety off the grass to squat on concrete round his apparatus, the tool aforesaid and a random sliver of paper. Now he tilts the glass to catch a single dart from summer's bursting quiver, training it on his…

amid the loved lost causes, the revival of the classics, the classless society, you work on a dirge for the language your grandmother loved you in: snih, trava, lyubov. . .

There I was one day in the parking lot of the First Brother's Church on one foot, a giant whooping crane with my left ibex finger against my temple trying to remember what my theory of corruption was and why I got so angry years ago at my poor mother and father, immigrant cranes from…