Poetry

How It Was

When he came back he wanted it all to have been the whiff of Gitanes, Place du Tertre silhouettes, carnets de billets, and the Clignancourt jazzers but in truth it was neither the city nor the heart-stopping Hovercraft ride but the long dark night of the North, the Artois, and L’Île de France, where they’d…

A Wild Tom Turkey

When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find not like when he stands in the stubble across the road brewing his voice with deeper and deeper percolations of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything in feathers,” stopping now and then to display his fan and perform a wobbly polka, chest heavy as he breasts…

Story for Children in Which:

“poor” girl/boy, shoes shoes catch moonbeams “because” once upon the moon near/far side a shoe factory for those who’d inhabit the earth till shoemakers flourished—and the girl/boy eventually catch so many beams they fly to the moon’s side to hover and to hear this: those who’ve been crippled, those who have not been allowed to…

Plagued by Coleridge

1. Three people walk on a cockle hill: broad-forehead Coleridge, yakking away emphatic whirling his arms; tall Wordsworth keeping his steady measure in long strides; serene Dorothy, taking it in, quiet, melding the men. A farm dog, half-grown, short-legged, snags their scent and runs to accost them, growls a moment, bares his teeth as if…

Giant Snowballs

All winter two giant snowballs stood in the center of the trampled schoolyard, & another one off to the side I felt bad for, then felt foolish feeling bad for. Every day I observed them through the chain link fence. Three giant snowballs the strewn parts of a would-be snowperson’s body. I’m trying not to…