Poetry

I am searching for the phrenic nerve when I remember the bad feeling I have about you.   Formalin pricking my nose, an attentive hush pressing all around me. This test is timed, but I look into the body, and I’m lost.   The word itself makes me anxious, sounds frantic, frenetic. Lightning strike climbing…

I go into our bedroom closet with its one blue work shirt, the cuffs   frayed, the paint stains a loopy non- narrative of color, of spirit.   Now that you are bodiless and my body’s no longer the body you knew,   it’s good to be reminded every morning of the great mess, the…

My brother is lost. I can’t find my brother. I say it over again— when I lost my brother. A back road I knew once and now   can’t find. A specific wave on John’s Pond. The last one we saw there, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one   office to the…

That afternoon, Bovary went to the apothecary’s closet, fumbling for arsenic to draw out her black bile, make her mouth a hole. She waited hours for the worst of it, the shearing of her dark lovely hair— though for many years my mother’s hair was not lovely but thin as sagebrush an autumn fire had…

I like the idea of a spratchet, which today I learned is the plastic divider used in checkout lines that says this is almost mine and this is almost yours. I like how it helps two strangers not skinny dip in the reservoirs of each other’s bank accounts. And there’s nothing rude about a spratchet—…

In the tradition of aunts and nieces we were traveling on the continent, and, as in the tradition, she had no child; we slept in one room, in one bed.   What of men? I would sit in the hotel window in Paris, looking at the people on the street below— they held no interest….

By then, simple questions had grown blades: you’re not even going to shave came to mean, I don’t like the way you look, or that’s how I came to hear it. On certain days she’d say, do you love me today? and I would say, even more than yesterday, and she’d say, that’s impossible!  …

I liked the joyful sound of the piano coming from the open door where a few departing partygoers giggled, arms linked. I went in. But despite the pianist’s spirit and those lively partygoers, this party was on its last legs. A brown-haired woman with a brass hoop around her neck and an empty martini glass…

after Peter Harris   A Japanese shrine is lit by ten thousand candles. One by one, jungle crows carry the candles away to the fields. The flight does not extinguish the flame—the wick remains hot. Then, the crows bury their new light under dry leaves, saving the tallow in the wax for another day. They’ll…