Poetry

Your sister’s inside in a green gown and you, here, twisting your dread into origami tissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong, you’ve crashed your mooring, fear every wart, organ, every minor— what’s this pain in my groin? Is this what’s been waiting all along? All of us carried off on a train, pressed to a…

Nobody judges clumsiness, and nothing about                  wounded animals makes me weep,                  but something about a woman with eyelashes like broken wings, about a woman                  wearing leopard print who wears the smell of death, languidly    awaiting    a predator…

  His superpower was achieving the world’s first happy marriage by wedding his daughter, whom he loved at first sight i.e., when she was adopted at the age of 6 by the woman he was wooing & whose inevitability in the girl’s life led him to stick around until the girl was a preteen, a…

It’s unincorporated, but there’s a place in Kentucky called Burning Springs, a few knobby hills and a stream and the smell of rotten eggs in the air. An unlikely place for paradox, but there it is, mysteriously, the ground is oozing paradox. If it was ever the scene of valor it’s unrecorded, which I prefer….

If the express should slow and then suddenly stop and sit utterly still for minutes on end and all talk stop and no one question the stillness, no voice announce what, if anything, is about to transpire (odd word, that, for me, “transpire,” out of Latin “to go out into breath” or air or nothing),…

Nothing moves me further away toward a mathematical horizon, completely abstract, like an oar-less boat on a perfectly still body of endless water, as when you speak to me in the fifty languages of nowhere. Though I have no answer, everything tastes like snow, a mineral sulk on the tongue, the essence of winter locked…

                 Tonight this silver plane is permitted to bear me in its belly through a black wipe of sky.                  And in the evil of my pride, I get to forget I am You-formed—needlework of hair          …

A white cat, paranoid, inquisitive, stalks night in circles around a white van with a shiv of silver on its front. There’s something secret in the wheel-well. Her lovely feline shoulders roll as she paws it, cocks her wild-eyed head at me, pretends to play with leaf rot piled around the tire. The dumb alluring…

Some mornings, his father floats at the foot of the stage and asks him to sing. He knows it is a ghost, a made airy thing. He knows nothing, no holler or raw shriek, keeps his father out of ether. Come, his shit-scared rage song goes, crawl into bed, weight this body down. But the…