Poetry

You’ve warned me about this, my machine—the threat of linear stains on paper, floodingover letters when you’re copying my pages.Your glassed-in mind is usually mimetic.But when something goes wrong, you’ll startto leak a gray scrim, as when a monk spilled wineon his inked annotation in the thirteenth century,freeing what I have to see as ghosts…

Look, I never swore to be as modestas a Victorian ankle, and sure, God blushedat a few of my prayers. I flush the hallelujahsfrom my skin before bed and let heaven gnawat my window’s light. My diary is a privateweather of regrets, but I refuse the shameof the moon. You can’t make me robe myselfin…

stolen apricot hair lotion,peeling accusatory aspirational posters,opening the sex drawer “accidentally,”spoonful of black ice rocky road,universal dismissive degree certificate,pocked ceiling of cottage nothing,breathless sound of the keyin almost a door, trees in still poses,filthy shoes in pairs for the doomed ark,time passing overhead,single cloudiness, O hourglass days,wasted sand, was it rightto scribble leave him under the one…

Quodlibet For a laugh, let’s list the things I lack:a foreskin, first & foremost—that was lootedlong before I noticed it; a knackfor foreign languages—my own included;memory—for all that I’ve alludedto; belief that gods or ghosts exist;the drive to love—& all that death’s polluted.Looking back, this is, in fact, a listof what I’ve had & lost…

Night whisperer, your hair’s tangled skeinof silver brushes our brows and the pastcomes crackling back, each jolt of joy or painas fresh, as strange, as when it struck us first. Daughter of thrumming earth and voiceless sky.Flame-keeping saint, yes, and two-timing slut;barnacle, shedding snake, and butterflyat once. Or farmer, sowing rows of doubt. To Zeus…

The image is of anOocyte breaking freefrom its containingcell wall an almost full moon framedby a whisper curlwhippoorwillof cloudthen later a rainbow      tinged frame                from below like a sill portends a bonfirefor May culminationsYour birthday again Your experiments        are Experiencestranslated into French O so tiredbut seethe lines connectingyou & meme & thee & he light goinginto me goes…

Crop of white furrowssown by splintered light.Pure cold, produce me.Brown mud un-burrowsgreen bark of the coniferwhose needles never leave.

“When he is very ferocious with me I cry;that sets all things straight,” Charlotte Brontë wrote.This passage strikes me as a little sly,yes? In it, Brontë almost seems to gloatabout the way that she has weaponizedher tears, her God-given power to emote.A male biographer once characterizedBrontë as “meek” on the basis of this quote—a reading…

Fourth Movement I was a man with one cow,one cow and no wife. I was a manwith clean shirts and no wife and one cow.I had strong shoes, pants with no knees.I had a bed. I was a man who sleptwithout his shoes, dreaming of one wifeand two cows. My shirts, which I did notwear…