Poetry

I let a boy lick my paper skin because he told meI was pretty. I let a man undress me, because he wouldn’tstop kissing me. I left my body at a party, and thenI left it again. A secret: sadness has no sound—not crying,just silence, like how at 5:00 a.m. I woke up in the…

He was looking for news of the world. He was looking for his daughterwho died in the fire, the car that burst into flames, the crash, his wifewho left him for her lover, he was looking at the world through a window in the den, where he kept the photographsand the heater, the air conditioner…

There was some connection to be made—your death, the election, the absurd snow—and I charged myself with making it, walkingdown Court Street after therapy, passing undermantled elms, watching the skaters’ anklesbrace against the weight of their careening. In the rink’s center, a girl spun herself into a smalltorpedo, red coat flaring conical, dark hat poking…

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

I go into our bedroom closetwith its one blue work shirt, the cuffs frayed, the paint stains a loopy non-narrative of color, of spirit. Now that you are bodilessand my body’s no longer the body you knew, it’s good to be reminded every morningof the great mess, the brio of art-making. —On the floor, 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 sawthere, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one office to the next, and no one…

That afternoon, Bovary wentto the apothecary’s closet, fumbling for arsenicto 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 lovelybut thin as sagebrush an autumn fire had passed over.There are mothers who…

I like the idea of a spratchet,which today I learnedis the plastic dividerused in checkout linesthat says this is almost mineand this is almost yours.I like how it helps two strangersnot skinny dip in the reservoirsof each other’s bank accounts.And there’s nothing rude about a spratchet—it’s as polite as plastic can possibly be.Unlike the bolt…

In the tradition of aunts and nieceswe 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 windowin Paris, looking at the people on the street below—they held no interest. I had graduated high school.I was…