Poetry

Teacup This

To my young daughter, I sing the songs my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter, I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the 1960s. Now I know you’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again, it’s all the same…

I Love You

Translated from Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author The history of the growth of heaven is the motion of every eyelash on every born and unborn human face. No kitties, no trees, no herds of wild animals are excluded or forgotten. The history of the growth of heaven is the image of all…

Stutter

since I couldn’t say tomorrow I said Wednesday since I couldn’t say Cleveland I said Ohio  since I couldn’t say hello I hung up since I couldn’t say burger a waitress finished my sentence  a green-striped mint   dissolved  on my tongue  from peacock to dove since I couldn’t say my name   I opened  as if…

So Long

Someone else died again, and when I heard, I felt the green ocean like a suffocating quilt pulled over me. I had a father once with a heroin needle in his arm. So what am I capable of? I’d rather flip a book open than attend a party, feel my numbed fingertips in the cold…

The Gang’s All Here

“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal…Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Don’t sit too close, the smell of…

Untitled

A brick warehouse, a cold morning, and Newark in the distance. Bleak is how I take my coffee, inside a shipping container while a plane cranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” something I’ve lost something a man would feel right saying but which sits under my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take…

Wild Through the Sea

Remember the night it snowed in a place we were told would never snow and like two shadows cast by a lamp standing in the presence of a Greater we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid the expanse of what I didn’t know endlessly swallowing the floes the ocean has always been immutable and…

Small Before-Church Poem

Laughing at the thought of lack of pleasure as a pleasure— monuments not yet objects, a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen, considerable weeds and fallen power lines to be here, I have more to say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,…