Shelter in Place

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  The plums rained down on us, then the fireworks. We ordered a package and we took out the trash. We had pulled weeds all season, sprayed aphids, we had done our duty if lazily. A friend visited for beer … Read More

Elegy for the Polar Bear

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  The blankness of the animal is profound or, no, a lack of blankness, a total   clarity of feature, her color particular and unnamable against   the snow whose bright coldness makes it blue. My aunt says, in   … Read More

God’s Receptionist

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  after R.S. Gwynn   She takes the hundredth call of the day before banging her toe on the table which happens more than she cares to say. She yelps—longs to curse but is unable. There are two men in … Read More

Woman Looking at Two Big Black Hearts

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  a sculpture by Jim Dine   Following the map, I find them— a pair of enormous black hearts,   faces, hammers, crumpled cans emerging from the surface,   as if they’d been bubbling up from inside when everything hardened … Read More

Self-Portrait as Kraken

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  At one end, my tentacles are thicker than mainmasts, fine enough at the other to pen a too-sentimental plea in your captain’s log. If you release me and I don’t come back, there’s your answer. If you release me … Read More

Dis

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  is the underworld, also a prefix to prefigure damnation atop of your noun: dislike, disquiet, distance— whatever’s apart and unlovingly weird. Down in Dis, sinners get whipped and greedy guys can never reach grapes. The boss either has a … Read More

elegy for félicette, first cat in space

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  cats aren’t given names before experiments are concluded bc researchers are less likely to love nameless subjects.   this i understand. it remains true, even for those destined to acquire many names. the black-and-white was chosen   for her … Read More

Blood Hounds

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  I wake up and brew the coffee And patiently wait for the gurgle, It’s like the last noise Rising off the wild boar the blood Hound smothered an Age ago.   I set the raspberries free. The knotted harvest … Read More

Postcard from the South

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  on my way through Dixieland I find a trading post some sarcophagus of time   body of bleached bones balancing a quadrilateral head with a gaping mouth that proclaims its name   I wonder what all they sell there … Read More

Regard the Other as a Verb

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  I don’t eat crow. I feed crow. My crow isn’t my crow. I name the crow because I’m human and want to know how a god feels. When I use my app to ID a tree, I pronounce it … Read More

Provincetown

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  “AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”—Susan Sontag   The summer I danced to Donna Summer’s endless I Feel Love, ecstatic, wanting to reach out, touch every peek-a-boo buttock at the … Read More

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