Poetry

Some gnats live on the land and some on the water. Many eat plants and some are carnivores. They are everywhere people are; they live on subantarctic islands, in deserts, caves. When they fly they’re usually so numerous they look like weather. The weather at dusk. Some are pests and some control pests. Some don’t…

Awfully mortal, aren’t they? Their inner lives twist, wad, and shred. Their outer lives are sometimes called shams.   I change oily, stained cases, eventually. Even if you’re tiresome, they’ll prop you, Crease your sleeping skin, Press comfort in.   I swam in a case, in a sulphur spring, Surrounded by white cows. I carried…

You could tell right away that I wasn’t a girl—   even though the strings lie, as does the neck, awkwardly jutting out of the dress, here and there the soft taut skin, almost calf, almost silk, or the gentle hairs right there on the most profitable place in the whole damn plantation. To you…

if we take spring and subtract early spring, the slush, the crocuses, the exalted and light infections of the nasopharynx, the lamb, all skin and bones— Rossetti and Blake are yet to comb the celestial wool, then Lent, budding green, then the great desert of April, from the first day to the last, then the…

It’s all over. But the smoldering hatred tried to jump out a window, full of indecision and cognac. And bikinis everyone will want to go to bed with. You tried to jump out a window because you have a penis. So do I. Everyone will want to go to bed with you. You may as…

We went to see The Book of Mormon (the musical). I was working on my own musical, The Book of Mermen “Merman? As in Ethel Merman?” No, I said, The Book of Mermen, those quizzical mythical beasts half fish half man. Though I could see where Ethel Merman would make sense as a musical—an excruciating…

Spring rolls in hard—swift, brash, heedless. Box elder saplings, blackberry and burdock break ground any place we leave alone.   A dozen dark purple tulips sprang up by the front steps. Did we plant them? Another gesture I can’t remember—   what I conceived, things I once said with such conviction. How I got from…

The rear view camera is why they hate us. Active Park Assist, so you can have a car, not learn to parallel park. Also Las Vegas, the decadent west. All You Can Eat is why they hate us, our fat ass falling off the edges of our chair. Our sturdy-ass chairs is why they hate…

after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan. A widow who’s spent her life working in a silk factory finally decides   to sacrifice everything for the sake of her only son’s one wish: to study in Tokyo.   “Be a great man,” she tells him. He’s all she has.   Twelve years later, she…