Poetry

I divide my time between the NewYork in my mind and a cow-sprouted field, divide my rightear from my left, though the leftreceives god-like frequencies onlymy poodle can hear. I divide myliver from my brain when I swillwine and smoke. Divide my sunnydisposition from the sun it neverowned. Divide my body frommy bed, home from…

There was a poisoning.Perhaps from the reincarnation ages ago where your hands curled and stitchedthe fake flower bouquets of 1860, dusted them with Scheele’s green,the arsenic powder breathed into your child lungs. Or maybe before that,like Napoleon, copper sulfate from a papered bedroom settled like a secretinto your waistcoat and gloves. Centuries have passed since…

I entered someone else’s suffering and when ISurfaced I looked behind me into the sheen of it. We’d been to the bottom, the muck of scales and femursOf trees. I’d communed with the dead, my dead, to make Sense of the sunless depths. They rocked me—father,Grandmother, friend—in arms of slippery weeds that moved Like flames….

Meant to nail the iron rose wreath, the seashell macramé, the twig pentagramto my backyard fence. Forgot the hammer, the nails in the glass jar. Planted green things—spearmint, sweet basil, lavender—and deepmaroon-to-black newly noirs, white impatiens in steelboxes. I feared the mold growing from rainy day after raw rainy day. Dug down into the boxed…

I part the wild horse’s mane      the arms rise and knees sinkand outside the window car hoods      line the DQ parking lotmy knees sink and elbowsbend as I’m told energy held inthe muscle is memory forming      but when I rise the nightdoes not alleviate the heat outside      the hotel where I did not expect      to be — not lost and…

The long stretch of green flattens into the horizon.          Forever and ever, he seems to say, but it is nothing, it is not him, it is only my mind, speaking into the silence.          In the distance, the goats wait patiently, the sun tilts patiently, the sky breathes its steady rays. We are letting time slip.          We are letting…

The bruised-blue sky, the blown-breath willow, and goldenrod fallen leaves woven with acrylic yarn into your best, most beautiful sweater: the fake wool woodscape felt soft on your skin, no stinging or deep itch, a scene wrapped around your teenage rib cage—all angle tones and autumn. You would wear nothing underneath, felt only the inside-out…

We waited around, for what I don’t know—the strange body becoming strangerthe more we stared?                                   After you starelong enough a cloud might take the shapeof a frog or an elephant lying down,or not look like anything but cloud. How much time had passed? After a while we put on our jackets and hats,then somebody dropped a deerskin…

There was no will. Only footwork. In sunless hospital roomsI played card games with men twice my age. Say it wasn’tabout falling but the gated terrain’s arrival after the jump,then I landed not in heaven but in Redding where I tradedmy blue jeans & black boots for a dotted white gown. Here,the men & I…