A white cat has come to sit on the backside of slaughter, To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates.The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion Or a coronation, not as angel or symbol of some comfortCreature, some benign break in the dying, But as human wish, as distraction from suffering….
She was old, my mother,and dead now, or so they said,and I could think of nothingbut boiling pots of water. Out the window,November’s birds peckingthe dry grass. More and more waterI boiled, watching it hissand spit, roil and seethe. She was old, my mother,and dead now, orso they said. Hour after hourI boiled wateruntil my…
All I ever needed to bring up with her was cranberries.She brightened no one’s eyes; I befriended her frown.Bogs, she says, when I rhyme fog.Bone-chilling overcast, she affirms damply.Wouldn’t you like to slip away from your burned houseand head to the cold coast, even if they have to searchfor you? I did that when the…
I’d bring them home in jars, in my bare hands,or sometimes wound around my arms: garter snakes,with their sleek yellow stripes, dull brown lizardstheir spiny toes and jagged sides. Once, a baby ringneck snake,no bigger than my pinkie, wearing its thin choker of coral. In Barbados, at my grandparents’, it was novelty I loved—to reach…
I always wanted a daughter, which isto say, I wanted a better self, flicked from my marrow—madeflesh. I wanted this bone-of-my-bones to move in the world, exceptionaland unharmed. Not this world. But a world almost exactly unlike it. Samepaved streets and street cafés, same slow unfurl of spring. Only in that world,the green of field…
Italic Z of snow. A perhaps raptor’s nest beside it in the pine. Families are going inat dusk, voices fading like numbers on used tram tickets run overin the parking lot. Small bag ofdog shit placed beside a rusty pole.Sometimes even outdoors there’s a stressyou can’t get out of, spinning aimlessly: you pass the mosses, life lifted…
for MW How do you hope to survive? & not just that: was it even the question? By midday the fog was burning off;; screech & call beside the anyway::: ::: the parent osprey had gone out looking for the right fish (did it fear stone?) & bryophytes rested on the soil as the soul might rest on the what…
after Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) I met a hapless mana literary critic—but I’m not only thatI’m a poet myself— he said we are fond of youyour poems are charmingbut don’t ask usto read them we cannot there are certain poemswe simply cannot toleratethe personal clutterthe persistence of feelingsthe touchy sensibilitythe diaristic indulgencethe painstaking messthe dense gesturingthe…
Does it surprise you to learn that I once had a wife?Someone to whom I showed my wounds, who made medangerous because, at unstrung moments with her, I wasso happy? It’s not something I talk easily about. She vowedto help me get my fate straight, a task obviously notwithin her power, but she seemed to…
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