poetry

  After a long time staring into the cliffs you finally said, I think that when a stone looks at Medusa it just becomes more comfortable in its own body. We laughed like birds. We showed each other our bones, … Read More

  I dreamed of you last night, a dream you, an almost you. We were driving in that old blue car I used to have, except that it was green in the dream, and not as old. We parked at … Read More

  New Year’s Day and the big reeds bowing over the stream’s headlong, white churn, only one back-flowing current glazing and glazing a black smooth stone, and you said This year it will be fifty years. Fuck years. Fuck tick … Read More

  Suddenly it was a storm and insects / a pet cage tumbling in the rain.   One morning they rose to find the lobster / had sheared away the legs of all the tiny frogs.   The street out … Read More

  In the afternoons, a girl and a woman together below a crepe of pecan trees / corniced rises, the city like a box of mud around them / seething concrete a fillip for turning / the pleasure of the … Read More

  Their udders were so bloated a thorn might have slayed them. Sidestepping their own stiff tits, the cows hustled & hurtled   through the doorway, a barge of skull & shoulder ramming a road to the feed trough. They … Read More

  At night I think about my father— how he no longer tends all the plants in his garden.   I wonder if in his blueprints   he draws our family in the living room or even uses a ruler … Read More

  No need for an appointment, crisis will erupt without you, another loud melancholy.   Stop picking your skin, pulling hair. Your mother would say stop that   you’ll leave a scar. Stop that you’re going to go bald. Maybe … Read More

  Your mother tells me how her own mother always talked when she did jigsaw puzzles,   pushing the pieces in and muttering “I’ll make you fit” under her breath.   I never met her, but she feels like a … Read More

  everyone i lived with is either dead or has since been reborn. on the cape sober houses flank summer homes. august women reek of moisture and diamonds. i know scallop fishermen whose hands smell more like fentanyl than mollusk. … Read More

  God it’s cold but not so cold that I would rather be asleep. I just want a little quiet and a lot of money, hallelujah. Now I am a cartographer scraping the frost from my windshield to make the … Read More

  How we love: by taking another name into our mouth and swallowing it   for safekeeping. By softening at a touch the way dusk dissolves the city,   bodies unmooring, skin syrup-sweet. I read a poem in The New … Read More