Poetry

Suboxone—illusory, nomadic, practical; the lighter with a sunset on the ledge, the roominess of midnights in small towns nodding out. All this I like. The cigarette stubbed out on the rearview mirror—this too I like. The little things: Cars lined up at seven a.m. before the gate to see the meteor crater has opened. Ruins…

A homeless woman at the reference desk asked, “Am I an angel, or merely a supernatural creature?” She was agitated, all the muscles of her narrow face in nervous motion, and I was too startled to answer. A man I worked with, who often ignored patrons for his own reading, rose and stepped forward to stand…

The dogs in the neighborhood are barking. At the end of his lead our young dog stalls in darkness between yards and digs in his two-year weight. He has a scent— God is in the garden. I crouch and point my light.   Characters run across yards with pumpkin buckets and faces in masks or…

which is a biographical fact only ever stated when discussing a man of either unrivaled righteousness or extreme wickedness. Imagine this: He never once used a bell in his saliva experiments, unless you count the plink of kibble falling from his dogs’   surgically opened throats, and why would you want to count that? I…

A term given to us by Franz Gall, father of phrenology, the lost art of God’s failure   to erase each ridge and bump from your skull. For which Gall invented his method   to codify God’s errors: a bump for adventurers and a bump for homebodies.   A bump for the vicious and a…

Lugging a corpse with you everywhere you went. Strapped to your back. Slumped in a wheelchair. Dragged on a sled or pulled in a red wagon. The corpse keeping you focused on your mortality. Reminding you that ultimately you’re just a corpse.   At first it was a fringe thing. Hipsters only. Then celebrities got…

for C.P.   What to do with all this flame but douse it with paper cupfuls of red and yellow pills. What to do with the sun that licks its rose blaze in the tiled corners of this ward, with the hours, with the burden of relief we’re allowed to feel. We still breathe. We…

He said he would hang himself so as not to make a mess.   But he was still there the next day. And the next. And the next.   He wrote the note for the cops on a page he tore from my favorite book   of poems. That’s all I saw of it— in…

I don’t remember wearing it to school or after dark   to the Halloween party where apples for bobbing   floated in tubs. I don’t remember staring   in the mirror to admire myself in the half-   mask, white blouse and black skirt, the fabled red hood   gaudy with sequins. My father paid…