poetry

  —after Sylvia Plath* here what you see is the intent to express the frame once concealed with ornament once unimaginable here flowers made as if cut by machine, as cog rotating hopes here glass, here metal frame here limestone, … Read More

  My son asked me how can she keep a baby from her parents like that I think about her the witch as I cut off most of my hair in the mirror midnight split ends on marbled formica I … Read More

  My mother carried an old man on her back after she fled Vietnam. He was small and shriveled, like a mummy, limbs broken and reassembled into a folded child. He had a musky smell to him, like river mud … Read More

  Everyone said it was the largest tree they had ever seen on a street in New York. Some said anywhere. The city sent a small crane, then its bigger brother; then, when that was not enough, a third used … Read More

  stopping with their chimera cameras departed currencies they want to see where the Bedouin coin necklaces are thread where the Druze cross-stitch their dinner mats devourer of spiders but we only write of your heady zenith as sons stand … Read More

  from your opening will come an era of inconsequence an adage without donkey or kettle to prepare the glacial faces for their wanderings in a place where the ants are already surviving better than we each day, you flick … Read More

  If you knew anything about deserts, you knew there were scorpions. So when one appeared in your yard, standing where the crosshatched patches of grass met the beginning of a field, you thought you were in one, and your … Read More

  Weed-scrabble, cropping for the hungry earth, this wet morning, young robin clutching at old ivy, berrying the fruits of autumn’s windfall. In the cemetery, apples. I am out of season, untrued wheel, a sour note, and yet there must … Read More

  Shallow, uneven, breath of an infant. The eyes are rock pools at low tide. Bones in the face are the face. No life, no expression. Not sleep, not illness, not the eternity-clouded expression of the newborn. Pot shard, mussel … Read More

  —after Johannes August Nahl’s “The Tomb of Madame Langhans” Bury a woman with her stillborn, the baby crawls out fingers first as the child of Maria Magdelena Langhans: Cherubic as a messiah. When a man breaks death in art: … Read More

  Strung out on a bench, I’ve worn light from a streetlamp, golden as an art halo or any manufactured light. I’ve pissed that gold into a sink at work, then served over-medium eggs hot, coffee cooled and too strong. … Read More

  Was when I was watching Misty Copeland dance “The Nutcracker” on mute, As I listened to “The Point of No Return” by Immortal Technique. It was simply beautiful. What other words could I use? Fierce. Elegant. Magical. The thought … Read More