They leave from positions of strength, like all baroque civilizations; leave the statues we cannot imagine moving for heaviness caught in the skirts. . . We watch their gestures grow finer and more nervous in the widening air. They are the best judges of wine; talk always at the glittering edges of things, the terrible…
for Helen Corsa All that is lost is the body and the object of desire. Approaching composition, the laureate said and resaid his name like the clack of British Railways: Tennyson, Tennyson-Tennyson, murmuring of innumerable be‘s—mere being, humiliating history. Heinreich Schliemann, final hero of Troy, once saw as a child a tombstone: “Here Lies Heinreich…
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…
The words carry themselves as carefully as a muscular woman tricked out in sequins walking a high wire. I ask nothing of them, I only set them in motion, as gently as feathers. Birds exert themselves more than the words do. Hunger compels them, they cannot choose but fly. Words, who seek no food for…
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