Poetry

The carnival doesn't rival the carwash. For a quarter, I could get my brother to ride on top and come out red as a letterjacket while the spray steamed through the window seams, a date's hand cupped the edge of my Bermudas, his lips opened on my neck. Then, as it dripped dry, the doors…

This late at night, this late in the spring, the north wall of darkness disintegrates, shimmies into atoms swaying on their chains like a curtain of glass beads, each one amber to its insect of light. Swaying, as someone preternaturally thin and disfigured stands bestride them waiting to be real;      yet beautiful if only she…

The Cleaveland Clinic advertises sun so light you could kick it with your tongue. You board a plane: note the exit, altitude changes, any difficulty in breathing. Morning slams into the the taillights of night. We will wait for you. Yours are: a moon hanging from a sleepless eye, a small AM radio pinned to…

My sister phones and asks if I'm getting anywhere. I say my house is full of ashes. I tried to burn the whole mess away. I realized I would die. I wept and put the flames out. It was a terrible mistake. So I took a ride. Long by yards by acres and acres of…

The train circled. You two hid in the algae trees, slinking around the plastic rocks, bellied down to the liver-colored land, getting close, getting closer until whose finger grazed the tracks? Who cares: you both reached the station sticky with blue, the transformer smoking and the train: crash! Daddy! But that wasn't you. You asked…

She did not look maimed. Heavy, slow, too dumb to stand and run when she was knocked to the ground, she took a gut-buster from the ram she'd refused and groaned and groaned if I lay a hand on her and went on groaning as I stood, strange in this life I'd begun, and crowded…

A thrilling wilderness of bio- morphic script, you said my letters scared you. And it's even worse in person: pink oil of lipprints, unnervingly organic Hi's, those kisses like collusions. For a moment we vibrate like underwater stones. What is this windfall? We are not easily becalmed. How you pull back as if to deflect…

(For F.W.) You have decided to live. This is your fifth day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat, the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you, my own mouth moving. Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor a mess, the garden ruined, the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?…

“Beauty is to expose the cruelty in men” — David Smith Dangerous, the air we breathe, the oily, roiling earth, the skin we touch in desperate sex and clinging. A woman in love is a pitiful thing, so huddled into herself and hoping she'll fit. Neither act of will nor imagination can change this. Locked,…