Poetry

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…

By then, simple questionshad grown blades: you’re not even going to shave came to mean,I don’t like the way you look, or that’s how I came to hear it.On certain days she’d say, do you love me today? and I would say, even more than yesterday,and she’d say, that’s impossible! and I’d say, it’s true,…

I liked the joyful sound of the piano coming from the open door where a few departing partygoers giggled, arms linked. I went in. But despite the pianist’s spirit and those lively partygoers, this party was on its last legs. A brown-haired woman with a brass hoop around her neck and an empty martini glass…