Poetry

She sits on a beach blanket, Gazing in her vacant way From the shadow of a striped umbrella, Talking to herself, The future a doomed plane Yet to take off. I am a baby, sitting Buddha-like Banging the sand, She is young, beautiful, Stranded in the past. Wisps of her hair lift in wind, The…

Go ahead, tell the one about the body & how it has been crafted: a house you’ll someday make a home of. Built-in bookshelves, bay windows, light on every side. You are carpenter & foreman, architect & owner. You’ll come to love the sloping floors, the doors sticking in their frames. All yours. Brick by…

Someone’s in a Hawaiian shirt again out on the parquet, doing the white-guy dance to Celebrate good times, come on!, one palm cemented to a sudsy bowl adorned with mini parasol that will end up between his teeth like Carmen’s rose then raffishly planted in some woman’s hair and she’ll feel fancy and adored. Who…

Don’t get jealous, she says, flicking her cigarette out into the cold and closing the window. I watch the snowflakes blow past, study the piles of books around her bed. I haven’t read any of them. A human body, laid open across two pages like plucked wings. Circles of constellations. I thought I could be…

The ark is barking baby barks. The hems are hawing while there’s sawing going on. Who is that high up, stemming and sterning? We’ve got barrels of loosely packed potatoes, We’ve got the first thick leaves of greens plucked and rolled, We’ve got the got we need to get on with it. If I’ve cleared…

The air is full of smoke due to regional wildfires…Call 911 only if you see active fire or have structure fire —Austin Police Department The city smells of smoke though i’m told The fire’s elsewhere. the fire’s always elsewhere, Until you can see it, then you’re running Toward it or more likely, away. untoward, i…

for Brian Higgins, d. 2015 However slivered, however occluded, however brindled the light you shined in your walks from building to building all these years, on sidewalks forking the city, or across the violet harbor of the suburbs; however vertigo’d my own vantage point—or myopic my ability to see a lighthouse light its way through…

At 2 a.m., the dog nosed up a robin on the pavement beside my car. It was less than a fledgling, and the nest was high above us in a parking lot paper birch, its fist of twigs and threaded trash plain in the August lamplight. It wasn’t clear whether the bird had fallen or…

I have been dying under these Connecticut stars all my life, relentlessly, even though the sky is different above Buenos Aires and Lusaka, even though the Magellanic Clouds float like blossoms of dust and could be seen for the price of a plane ticket. In fairness, I have Sirius and Vega and Aldebaran. In fact,…