Poetry

The needle sinks in. Cold snakes through my veins, chemistry that kills to heal. The doctor chats of skiing, how he glided along the empty, blank expanse of Commonwealth Avenue after the snowfall. I carry home a needle-deep mauve stain. As a child I had a nightmare of my mother, a black bruise on her…

Since I've lived in many places, it's odd That I continue to waken in Nebraska, Wandering into the sunroom where the wheat Has come up wide overnight. A girl leans Into the wind and it is I. Every day, it seems as though the poets thin; Rare breed. Of the people who have loved me,…

Here comes the hunger for the made thing. For what the      sea can't clean further. Here it comes buzzing after a stillness rust can't corrupt nor the secret blue moss under the hill. Don't look back that way, friend, at the      not-yet- knotted string—the gorgeous sweep of it the back of things keeps feeding into…

My foot, like a magic. bird in some fable, cleft open so suddenly, so gently— only my eyes awaken, seeing this new spring, this red, improbable river, this narrow tongue wagging where never was a mouth. Still, no pain, I walk on, until I wear the ocean's blue shoes, my ankles white with salt, and…

In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world In a white cotton dress. Kingdom of After My Own Heart. Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I      come home, Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic      chimes Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the      side…

Below the barn where you practiced smooking cigarettes for days till you could do it in public like an old hand, where at twelve you lay in secret with your cousin and couldn't kiss her no matter how willing you both were, you stood that day looking back, the field perfect with snow behind you….

The season turns. The trees wound the streets. We too want to be touched. We press a scab to feel the pain. Or tongue that place in the mind which yields a death. Last week, your grandfather. The old coot, 95 and every relative furious and mute by the time he was sixty. So you…

I                  Having roughed up the waters wind explodes like the curses from fist-ravaged lips                        in the cold superpower's                  innards, squeezing trite wobbles      of the do-re-mi from sooted trumpets that lisp.                        Nonprincess and porous                        nonfrogs hug the terrain, and a star shines its…

My father likes them hot and grows every variety known to burn the worst. Jalepenos hang in clusters like green bananas down the rows we are walking, our arms full of bread bags. Picking so many of them finally that our fingers sting and our eyes fill with water. “The little yellow ones with the…