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Your eyes float like sun grains through their light, pollinating the air — with idiots? If they graze and go, the same wind that brought them, blows them away, the same hand. Returning, they will appear as an orange in the sky, the segments as windows, the focus sharper, more acute. In them, I have…
The door slams. The corpse sits up. The dog says, “Don’t look at me.” They have planned this in Hollywood. They have planned your elopment with the boy with silver cufflinks. They have planned his mother’s anger, the snobbishness caught in her teeth, gooey as a night of bile. When you unbutton your blouse —…
When the locks froze I stuffed my hands with rags. My wife’s breasts or small animals work but I don’t use rocks; their edges make me dream fists. Wounds close – look at a chopped tree marry dirt, look at bird’s claws knarl on twigs. I like fingers supple as flames, something to lay on…
Everywhere gutter musicians with rare saxophones rise in the air like snowy egrets. The night wolf drifts on a coffin nailed with stars. A man in an alley unravels the feathers of a woman’s body. From the firmament above the rooftops a hand rockets loose, catching fire in the snow. The one window, steam-laced with…
(for Lynn Sukenick) She is the only go-go girl in Las Vegas with a white BMW with a chartreuse mohair bathrobe with dayglo pasties and monogrammed underwear She is the only go-go girl in Las Vegas with an emerald-green Ferrari with tulips in her fishtank Dunhill in her humidor onions in her glove compartment She…
What’s hard, sandy, and won’t crush like sweet olives against my lips? I lie on barbed wire but dream of caves plushed with skin. My mind’s lined with vaseline, my body cups like a breast against the sheet. Think of angels. Their marble knees streaked with veins, their thighs locked against the touch that spreads…
I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…
I I think I’m lying. Surely one nation divided implies another sad device of history, when I might have said road into ourselves and seemed friendly. This country nags me like a bad excuse, these critical days away from myself demanding accounts, looking at the future in my wife’s sharp face. II Rutledge, if I…
The squirrels are frantic in the branches; birds circle; the cat waits near the roots, wanting to strip the bark and grease the trunk. Here’s the news under the ground: the rain’s driving weeds through concrete; farmers are tying razors to worms to fish sprouts out of seeds. You’re eager too. Don’t your fists twitch…
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