Poetry

I carry the East with me, I carry it to the West. Wrap it in layers in a small suitcase tagged for the West, In America there is a romance that calls for leaving Known people & places to head for the West. I open a suitcase & stare at shoes that leaked sand; Oh,…

He asks what I want him to do to me, the next move capable of unraveling our bodies precariously stacked. I tell him the truth: I don’t know. I do not tell him how I still can’t feel my body when in another man’s arms. I travel—backward, forward—the horizon is concealed by the still-brown trees…

Letter openers, proving we miss people urgently. Bottlecaps popping with satisfactory sound. All the miraculous ways to experience time— a roller coaster, a deep breath in sideways snow, flicker of windowsill basil glimpsed from an El stop at dusk. City streets patterned like plaid in a dishrag filling with sun. Portable stoves. Recycled stationary. The…

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront  pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit  flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward stars where we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys.  Once we were…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawings of a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hall singing about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musical and was a farmer, but wanted to be…

What have you done? Opened this box of sound, warped like sand beneath water, remember that? The waves of perception moving you away from me. We grow farther apart, but we are equal in our ignorance of how. No change there. Like celestial bodies distancing—like the animals in autumn. How? This knowledge, how will you…

Billie, I told the Devil not to let you into Hell. It’s where you think you’re going soon, when at last that golden horse’s hooves run roughshod over your heart. No, you have your own heat, a heady steam off your scalp. Before you, I hated my smell, like his fingertips after stealing a girl…

Who was that girl in the maze, too busy being a needle to understand she was also an eye? All bothered heat. All light the underside of a storm cloud scraping the city with its silver. Some of her is left in me, slipped into the marrow, caged beneath ribs. Is she this blunt thumping?…

“It’s not a good disease to have,” my doctor says. I admire his grim honesty, I admire it greatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.” Which sounds about right for me. Two years of misdiagnosed torment and now this. I ask him about suicide. He nods. “It happens,” he says. When I tell him I’ve…