Poetry

The blue Norfolk air Is familiar with sea gulls. The ground is crawling with cats. The random observer, going about his time, May carry a pencil and piece of paper, To hunt out remarkable quarry:            Today, Five cats, all furred-out in black and white      Patterns, were up in the same tree;      All out on…

He’s turning into a Mason jar for homecured liver pickle; showing a fine regard for black Jack Daniel’s. I saw him once in a silence so pure I thought of the gulls who stand on the Charles so long you think their soles are frozen flat. The other time he sang, said he’d spent his…

“Am I mistaken or didn’t the seem unusually calm that day? As absorbed as a man tying a package. As it turns out, you might say he was just holding his finger to the knot. “And when I called her last week she said she couldn’t chat, she was bleeding like a bag with the…

That last of schoolgirl summers — oh, all guts and sweet simplicity, I took Europe in a sturdy stride. Polite, intense, grasping German grammar, my days a neat balance. . . The mornings meant gardens in sunlight, streudel and cream at eleven. Evenings, the medieval towns, my brother strolling in them, ending always in yellow…

There is a belief among the Malays that if a woman dies an early death there are certain precautions that must be taken. When she is put into the ground she must be put in with gold in her mouth and eggs in her armpits. If these two rituals are not performed she will leave…

A Gatsby setting ten years later: rural, bored by summer nights of crickets and secrets on the steps, “Humoresque” and sitting on the running board of Daddy’s Ford. . . You never like to talk about the details, and yet somehow I know the smells of Grandma’s house: gingerbread, the cows, and the soap of…

I colored her teeth yellow between the cherry lines. She flitted her tongue across her lemon ivories. Tongues are the color of hothouse tomato pulp. Tongues are good for so many quiet immersions. Low calorie. Pushed between your mashed potato porcelains, uniting, slithering around your oral phallus, tickling the smooth cavern of sacred soul palate….

The shining door down the hall opens to admit to these corridors the familiar monsters of my dreams. They are branches that flower in winter, pools that can never freeze for they have swallowed arrows, live hearts cut out of paper. They carry warmth to headstones but suck my breath, just as overcoats smother bodies.

Someone at school told her if you die in your dreams you really die. Her brother’s laughter jumps from dune to dune as they walk across the beach. Left behind, the family slips on snowy nightgowns, preparing for sleep. The waves slide stones over her toes then pull them back. She steps in a wave…