Poetry

Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms.Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to beadmired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of ustook the opportunity to punch our neighbors, or, in our…

There’s a radio station at the left end of the dialwhere you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes;how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms;how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroaduntil babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the big conspiracies: how the…

“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.”—Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!”—Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheepwith lambs on a hillside near the old colonialmansion between here and town, and anotherof sheep dying with their dying lambson the same hillside in bad weather….

Summer is entered through screen doors,and therefore seems unclearat first sight, when it is in facta mesh of fine wiressuspended panewisewhose haze has confused the eyes… What if we never entered then—what if the days remained like this,a hesitation at the threshold of itself,expectant, tense, tensileas lines that crisscross each otherin a space forever latentwhere…

I was as true as the numbers it takesto make a fever, and even if Julywas a slow-burning ship, I could stillfind comfort in the scattered spectrumof wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdogsilence. Winter is a heavy opal claspedaround my neck, and the city skulkssilver-haired and ornery, and oh—…

Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into themorning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel,Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’sfailures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makeshim run a stop sign bang in front of a cop….

Seven, maybe eight years old, nude, and outOf nowhere there she wasStreaked from the waist down in glisteningPebbled green shit, shivering as she ate a tube of cherry lip GlossIn the Great Ape House at the Lincoln Park Zoo.My wife was the first to see her—Her hand flying to her mouth.A man in overalls, a…

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 heat as if at any momentThey’d flood…

It’s the last dayof teachingin prison and timefor my promise:They could readme. Lay my lifeon that wobblingtable. Ignore fora momentthe torn coversof their rejectanthologies. Ignorefor a momentthe camera watching,the speaker tellingthem where theyneed to be:to Buddhist call-out,to meds, to cell.They’re grinning;I never giveanything away—not a pencilnot a secret.The first card flipsand Jeremiah saysLooks like you’ve…