Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…
1 Like a transparent tooth In a myth’s mouth I sang of words in words That had no foretell 2 I was the closest relative To the one who never existed That absent autumn drops Its cease-colored nets on oh 3 Ever-so-longing I lay Spanking my placenta plate In curtseyland I’ll stand now Groundswell gate…
A barn owl for an m’s a funny way to run an alphabet tho The merciless talons’ grid over a foot square A white whoosh a juju all eyes & feathers & bless your magnanimity, Kenneth, your immortal artifacts, wine and bread
Eyelashes did their job: they lengthened the afternoon, like a dress hem. Then that night the hem began to rise, in stages revealing scenes from my shameful life. Those calves up which the hem reproachfully rasped, catching, lingering over the ugh pictures did belong to a woman or were they mine— I hid my eyes….
An hour before sunrise, The moon low in the East, Soon it will pass the sun. The Morning Star hangs like a Lamp, beside the crescent, Above the greying horizon. The air warm, perfumed, An unseasonably warm, Rainy Autumn, nevertheless The leaves turn color, contour By contour down the mountains. I watch the wavering, Coiling…
1 Adaptation First the fisherman’s woman asks for a double bed. Granted. Then one uninterrupted day nobody stumbles across bearing invoices. Granted. Then a room apart wherein the bed takes dominion. Okay, okay. Then a child to celebrate bed, day, and room a sailor’s knot with a blue eye and a green. We all know…
The yeti, experts will attest, is physically unkempt at best, and due to this may go for weeks alone among the snowy peaks. Abominable and unique, this salient Tibetian freak is sometimes sighted in the mists, thereby confounding folklorists. No friendly woodsman brings him wine so high above the timberline, and no small bird cajoles…
Don’t turn around. It is the expected behind us, we have only to move forward along the stalk of surprise as it grows and branches. It is winter. The trees march away from the window like the ghostly skeletons of fish. They take me from this place, stalks that lead to the next season, landmarks…
Bigger than houses, than in fact the whole village including the church which falls out the bottom, he’s in space, a purple motley against pale ground. He’s a 3-legged stool, with the aid of a chimney. High, he plays himself sick, or well. The green advances or retreats, face and bow hand have it. A…
Winter 1999-00 - Digital