Poetry

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…

I might have guessed,running the streets that night, running each rightdown the middle, not meeting a car, rain soakingand so soft, my arms held out for the lastcorner to the house, that the dark figureon the porch swing would be my mother, the night and stormand night’s storm like a sentence she could no longer…

things might have been otherwise. Everyone remembersthat time she walked in with flowerssewn onto the hem of her dress, charming to allbut the flowers, and the fingers of outside lightnow lacking those flowers to act upon, and the passerby beereturning to find nothing there, and the drinking rootdone drinking. Everyone knows a backward step may…

You took my hand and took me to the train.The sky inhaled above us as we ran.The weather was suspended like a crane.The woman’s hand was taken by the man.The train was in suspension on its tracks.The woman took her ticket from her pocket.You left me at the train and then went back.The weather was…