Poetry

  • Massachusetts Three-Liners

    In this form invented by the author, each three-line poem has exactly 17 words. I. VERITAS 1. Harvard's River Such blinding brilliance, mirroring Sol on flow: To see you, Charley, First I must shut my eyes. 2. Harvard's Fog1 You house, fair Harvard, so much—you spawn so little— Bloom. Bees Don't poke in glass flowers….

  • The Sash

    The first ones were attached to my dress at the waist, one on either side, right at the point where hands could clasp you and pick you up, as if you were a hot squeeze bottle of tree syrup, and the sashes that emerged like axil buds from the angles of the waist were used…

  • Explorer

    From his monstrous planet, light-years from the cities, And still coated in protective larva, He arrives in no-time flat. Within himself, as if chanting A mantra, he whispers “curved space,” “chronity,” “Warped equation,” “parallel breath.” The silence Of the ashen landscape dunks his heart In a deeper ocean of quiet. The ghosts take no notice….

  • The Payment

    Always you feel beautiful in the light. Is it only sensation you've craved: the body born to bloom, arcing open beneath the sun, the smile surrounding your every curve, pore, angle. For this some say you may have sold your soul. So now for days, months, more, there's been nothing to make you shine as…

  • In Ignorance

    We wake with darkness pouring Into our mouths, sister sleep With her east-iron links Broken. Priests hunch over us; Unfeeling their words, the scorn that darkens Foreheads. Brother eyes brother, Lizards circling on a white, bare wall. Forgotten, the porcelain tub where children Scouted the soft edges of their bodies, safe In the maternal water…

  • Dream of Ivy

    You know the story of the woman in a turret and how ivy puts its fingers across the moon. And besides, no one could hear. Ivy that grows forever against the dankest part of a wall gnawing gargoyles deep in the belly of the house. I would have lowered my long hair to a lover…

  • Bread

    That sadness of white bread— To weave a noose of farewell Like the lightbulb over the supper table Transcribing a circle, where your forehead meets the world, Where your words become other people And you are doled out, eaten without butter. *     *     *      Because I love you the ceiling and the air Suddenly matter. Split clear…

  • Artist Colony Applications

    take me I'm paranoid enough to imagine the woman with towels steams letters off my corrasible bond and rearranges them to tell the cooks not to serve me the right meat I have English publishers who will scale sheer stone and glass on days when nothing much is happening my typewriter's often mistaken for the…

  • Delicious Monstrosity

    With the flat side of white plastic spatulas three old ladies hunch on a park bench, slapping gobs of blackberry jam onto slabs of dark bread. Nearby a hobo rolls over on his belly, spots the women and thinks just how sweet that jam would taste. Slowly, he gets to his feet. The women do…