Poetry

My Malaria

Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…

Franklin Street

Cambridge Mass Rain falls outside. The bulb’s ablaze in the kitchen Blinds down. Winter. My woman stands upright from our bed. My daughter dreams in another country. It’s only tuesday. Beginning the week, nobody’s of humour. I am wooden. There’s no contact left, somehow, with old friends.

Fuck Poem

The rooms live on. When we finish, they continue, the walls creating the same space, holding the same air that held our bodies when we held our bodies, preserving the scene when we have abandoned it for some novel sunset, some television, dinner at a friend’s. The bed is forced into it. The lamps compose…

The Corrected Works

(for Lynne) 1. My fingers will not function when your eyes are closed. They stop at the letters of your shrugging shoulders; your clothes whisper: “There are words better left alone.” At odd hours I rob you blind and hurry home carrying the ill-gotten loot as if it were the history of future civilizations. I…

Poem

Sometimes when the sun is perfect as an apple in a still- life with oranges, and clouds are all coming home to me, like horses, the way I want them, and the city is far enough away for once, the ocean no longer a lost coffin to be prayed over constantly, I remember we will…

Voice From Danang

After we had burned on the water a while, amid the chopper-borne shouts, flares, and thrashing rope ladders, we put into quiet, dark rooms. I couldn’t touch you through my walls – my nails screeled into chines. Why had they bored lights in me like that? You must have known we were set on sand….