By which I mean I look like that flower that fireworks in mid-sentencein the sky, over the end of a sweaty ball game. The crowd makes its wayto their cars while popcorn-spill & multicolored chocolate candies meltinto concrete steps. Maybe I mean you make me want to livebeachfront—so I can taste the salt & cliff-twist…
Georgia, forgive me. For years I’ve carried this grief like a hoop of bone, framing everything I see: fragments of water, fragments of earth. No visible wound, no body to bury, no song for safe passage to whatever the next world brings. I must be the only person here not asking, Where are the flowers? Fuck the flowers, those…
Humpbacks in journey rendered, in Eastern Australian watersan Indian Ocean air. How pleading tones jump across continents intorivers of sound scientists call non- human revolution, perplexes. Perhaps a singer lost course and migrated east from Antarctic feeding grounds.Did whitecaps trick or force; before he forged a life worth its music? Hisvoice haunts night-oceans in silver; intones his own dialect…
In my Fresno, there are no prerequisites,just a frontage road inside the fence floppedto the west. The cover charge for a poetic identityis delegitimized alongside white aesthetics—between the rows welting the earth’s still dustlike corduroy. On one side, almond trees, pistachios.Fieldworker housing spray-painted with ads.The fervent recall of history from poets in the traditionhover in…
Blame all the wrong books I read at thirteen.Blame my cold blooded birth in late December.Blame the truth for how dark it gets,blame the bite down, the pinned wrists— dearest, here it is: I wasn’t raised right.But I don’t need a daddy, don’t want somegoddamn gentleman. Romance is for show-offs.Roses, a waste of nature in…
1. A splinter driftsthrough a soot-slathered sun ray,its light: blue in orange orthat orange glowing. Beside the fence’s sunlit face,wrapped in a calico quilt,my head tilts and I seepressed into tire treada snow-nibbled leaf. Nine years afloat,the sky, dressed as water,neighs at headlightsthrummed awakewhen Coyote’s teethjewels the mesa’s rim. 2. I turn to my left…
You can tell whether a bird has a mateif there are pinfeathers on its head, new feathersthat start out as stubs full of blood then enshroudthemselves in a white scaly coat as they grow.Preening releases the feather, but a bird can’t reachthe top of its own head. A mate, a friend, or childpreens that spot,…
I, a deaf man, thankhearing aidsfor not working,How many insults I did not hear! in full mystery ofpersonhood Itoe, naked, talking to you, God, since I am afraid to find myself alone. I now have 24 hours 00 secondsbeforetwo menshove my cooling body into an ambulance van —I know a death that can be explained is…
For John Ashbery, in thanks We are long-lived, with bodiesthat tend to outlast the mind.But not you, Tootsie Roll.You had a holster of highlightersin a million shades, and you’d use themto mark arrangements of bluespruce in a cartoonishly repeating landscape.Fossil teeth, or a dark motif not unlikethe clean surface of a lakestanding up for the…
No products in the cart.