Poetry

This curve of the pitcher, thrust of the handle against my palm, this lip where I run my finger over the edge has no regard for function or for thirst. And what if it leaks? The imperfect body in its worn-out skin. Salim can fix it. Thirty years in his shop in the Old City…

Last fall our house was almost lost in a jungle of tumbled beanstalks. The air was green awhile. The light was yellow. But with the first frost the fat leaves turned brown, lost body, and, crashing softly to the ground, they kept me awake all night. They were too large to rake. And we couldn't…

A morning storm tosses at the windows like certain blossoms I know, and I hold a ruby jar to my eye. May this be a good year for them, in spring darkness the roadsides banked so with blossoms you might think the plow had just passed. Then, in latest August we'll check our places between…

What wrong is is mice Touched by the incorrect spell, A simple error really: Instead of horses, citizens Nickering over the fence. And it is what happened When the gentle brown rat, Giddy with incantations, Pulled on with black gloves The black hood of Inquisitor. And when the pumpkin, pale In the moonlight, sprouted Clumsy…

She lies there nearly hidden, except for face and black hair, in what looks like kudzu. But she wears it like bedroom makeshift: Tuesday's nightgown becoming the seventh veil. She has persuaded blue sky to hang around behind her and set a peach on the edge of a cloud where it streams down nectar. The…

for John Peck The sun went down for hours on Silver Lake through low clouds and the sun path on the water stretched over the whole end, catching the red and spattering it down into the small waves the breeze made—the wake of motor boats a broad slash of light that spread and spread. Suddenly…

My three-year old holds a forsythia branch down at an artless angle. It yellows out. She names its name for      me in a slow, awkward way, and is handed a shiny Jefferson nickel as reward. Now she has a shiny nickel clenched in the same tiny fist. But her brain has already formed its own…

A flotilla of ceilings moves like gulls over the drowned faces of ancestors. In a garden of shells, Kitty, my great-grandmother, plays a coral pianoforte. Her black curls, “beau-catchers”, flutter with every current. The carpets give up their ghosts. All the eccentric corners hold uncles, ginger-haired, twisting pouches of tobacco. The sachet aunts are tucked…

Brawling in the bush with himself our schnapps-bloated German punches free to the sidewalk, mock-orange blossoms in both fists. His bright yellow blazer, a sign of bad conscience — for we know his taste is good, and bottomless — turns every human head. It's twilight, his only happy hour. Truculent finch back from the feeder,…