Poetry

Seven, maybe eight years old, nude, and out Of nowhere there she was Streaked from the waist down in glistening Pebbled green shit, shivering as she ate a tube of cherry lip Gloss In the Great Ape House at the Lincoln Park Zoo. My wife was the first to see her— Her hand flying to…

In my parents’ day, they called lovers flames, and I’d try to imagine this literally. I remember a girl asking if I wanted to make love, which I thought then meant sweet talk: You are breathtaking. My first loves were older; they took the top, their hair fell and swept my face. I felt their…

It’s the last day of teaching in prison and time for my promise: They could read me. Lay my life on that wobbling table. Ignore for a moment the torn covers of their reject anthologies. Ignore for a moment the camera watching, the speaker telling them where they need to be: to Buddhist call-out, to…

She sank and died—the girl from out of town that summer. They pulled her body like waterweed, then winter came, enclosed the lake in glass, and sealed the dark cavern of our questions. We skated on the frozen shell. All around, the mountains glittered chained in ice. The lake was pale blue and cracked with…

“as if more than mortality brightened the air, like a girl tanning on a rock alone” —Derek Walcott Weighing less than a bead of perspiration, a mayfly alights on her breasts as if she’s chosen to wear the identity that’s chosen her in this heat where the borders of beauty evaporate along with the past….

Despite the electric gate to the driveway, it wouldn’t be hard to get inside the house. It’s white, with a matching fire escape, a pool-ladder leading up to the second-floor porch. I’d just have to be careful scaling the spikes on the five-foot wrought iron fence, move stealthily through the manicured shrubbery, past the rubber…

The Scheherazades played bridge every Thursday afternoon. Probably there were reasons for this as the ladies in the group might, on occasion, attest. The sea was there before them, its meaning immeasurable. After a twelfth trick, the one most beautiful surprised by confessing there had been no ”relations” for six years. Some nervous laughter, of…

Two doors down the neighbor kid hung a white wire reindeer with twinkle lights from a tree as if freshly shot and ready for butchery. It’s pleasing to live so near the country, the trees, the rolling hills and apple stands. But it does mean you have to put up with gun shots into the…

All the positions are filled, the pastor said, but you could be a floater. Meaning I woke each morning not knowing and at breakfast a man named Archer told me what to get busy with. On Monday I hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets. On Tuesday I helped the carpenters dismantle a barn’s gable. Weeks…