Poetry

Don’t get jealous, she says, flicking her cigarette out into the coldand closing the window. I watch the snowflakes blowpast, study the piles of books around her bed. I haven’t readany of them. A human body, laid open acrosstwo pages like plucked wings. Circles of constellations. I thoughtI could be the hero, when the streets…

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 my throat it’s because…

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 toldThe fire’s elsewhere. the fire’s always elsewhere,Until you can see it, then you’re runningToward it or more likely, away. untoward, i know,The coward in…

for Brian Higgins, d. 2015 However slivered, however occluded, however brindled the lightyou 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 abilityto see a lighthouse light its way through mist: I know that…

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

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

The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed.The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. Inevery house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living micebuild their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed atthe sagging couch.  

The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes,that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye,you’ll learn to say it. What you want isdirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave.Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street,turning a corner before I can seethat red plaid shirt, torn sleeve. Tender 26,bad number, risky year…

Did I know him? Yes his speed(did I tell on him, turn him in?)fell out of his pocket climbing upmy two-story steps—hmmm,what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny,condiment no wonder he talkedso fast, eyes switching back & forth,if I sat at his feet with some slownarrative. He was a chef—an excuse. Did I go to the porn…