Poetry

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…

Arms around me, tongue in my mouth he was just a cliche I couldn’t listen to again. Beard, a tired rose in his buttonhole, a tweed jacket & a few jokes at the door. Watching his sex come up was as distant a thing as viewing oil rigs on TV at work in the North…

(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…