Poetry

A basket in the shape of a sunflower— still hanging on your bedroom wall. You made it in school. You loved it so much you wouldn’t stop making it. Or couldn’t stop. We don’t agree, on what you said. But I was your favorite. I thought, What kind of boy makes such a basket? Professional…

Some say the Army                                             and some the Marines and some say the Air Force is the greatest sight sweeping over this crippled earth but I say love                       for example                                                        a wedding the bride’s face hidden as though no longer hers to share                                  and the sound of wailing            oh, Anaktoria                                             what have they done the soldiers…

and I answer by driving around, which seems to me the most American of activities, up there with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers or eating potato salad with green specks of relish, the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all the strange pickled bits we carry over from other places, like we did on…

a father has lost his son. He circles shoe racks, lingerie, dressing rooms, calling out “Marco!…Marco!…” We all want to help, but it’s just too much: Oh, the tragedy of naming then losing a son named Marco— born to love and to wander, whole head submerged in the starched cup of an outsized Playtex bra,…

This practical kid, born Capricorn, actuary of the stars, he’s planning my death, sure of the thermodynamic heaven he’s invented. Because energy must go somewhere in this system, in his I’ll be repurposed as a tree. And this comforts me, as no discount coupons for paradise ever could. Finally fitting, I’ll meet my zero as…

O tulip, tulip, you bloom all day and later sway a deep-waisted limbo above the dinner table, waiting for a coin to drop into your well, for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel. Soon, on ocean winds, dawn cries its devotion, our world entranced once more into being. Let go your sumptuous…

1. Know your origin: you are a token of the afterwards of love. What flinches in the ribbon of your utterly new blood is nothing but the echo of a bed post— pulse.            You have grown up. From filament within your mother’s bulb, you have evolved into a chandelier of bones, weightlessly orbiting your portion…

All winter the ghosts were waiting for a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so you were roped in. February had the year on pause, the days like holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You had no knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teach the…

to Sleep   I’ll count backward from a thousand till my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivel in a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight. Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping sky to slip behind the…