Poetry

I took for the dawn The steelmills of Gary Burning their corner of the night. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. At four am the sky takes on These willful transformations. To keep awake, I sing off-key The fading staticky tunes, A dj's voice a thousand miles near. My life has never been more In…

“Before placing me on your shelf, please take me by the feet and give me a few hard shakes to help restore that ‘just made’ look. Thank you.” I have been carrying these instruc­ tions around in my pocket for weeks, pulling them out at odd moments. I found them on the street and I…

I bought gasoline and ink (I did not buy booze, I did not buy the moon, I can no longer afford the moon). But moon moon what did you buy? A mosquito with a net, a plaything (air), a lantern lit by gasoline for your other side, side with stars, side by side with streams,…

Thousands of codfish Glitter in open Cases. They look So still on beds Of ice, I tiptoe Around them. Gutted, Dead instruments, They will not trill The high or low Seas again. They lie Quiet as knives. They, too, were feared By their lessers, Squid and mussels. Still, these losses move me little. Tomorrow they'll…

In the pink light of the funeral parlor they spread her out, the arc of a lamp overseeing the calm colors of her folded hands. How far away from us she lies in the big, serious casket like a creche, holding as it does her babied corpse. Visitors in clumps of twos and threes sway…

To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…

All day I've been thinking of the grief on each of their faces, Adam and Eve. The feeling is closest to a wave as it peaks, how it seems on the verge of self-consciousness before it collapses. Their mouths hold a single sound that divides, familiar as rain. The angel points away from the green…

Cloves were four-eighty-nine a jar in the supermarket two years ago. And I felt my heart race at the cost and bought them, an investment, their value rising higher than silver earrings, handmade at the silver shop for six dollars that same year. The cloves were perfume in the silver spicebox shaped like a castle,…