poetry

  Rosie, who’s dying of malabsorption, yaps on the front porch. A walking ossuary, she treads the matchboards and waits for the Witnesses—two young women who must smell faintly, I think, of fried food or red rubber balls or mud. … Read More

  Headlight-brightened bodies pass by, briefly, before blackening again in the nameless expanse of gulch & grass. One could almost say   illusion, that all this seeing is a trick the light plays to keep us   rooted in place. … Read More

  I am listening    by which I mean humming over      by which I mean talking over a bit less than usual       to one of those songs I’m told     have molded generations which I assume must mean something has changed inside … Read More

  What happens when no one who could hold a pen saw your great- aunt as human: records and recordings pinprick your neck’s back— Before they called us stupid coolies, we descended from the Moon, made of the star white … Read More

  You see only an impression in dug earth, long settled into dent on the forested floor: an unmarked grave where a corpse sinks. Moss- covered granite fieldstones in electric green.   The surface falls as a body returns into … Read More

  Cloudy, primal green floods the canvas, superimposed with a scarlet maple and sepia poplar leaf upright as rooted trunks. A trinity—three seasons— death closest.   Stages of cancer—yours IV when found near Easter. You died in the height of … Read More

  —from The Warhol Letters   I’ve become obsessed with bears & I hear you laughing at me through a veil   of Fire Island sweat & zinc oxide. Summer smells salty, sure, but more chemical   than what’s iodized. … Read More

  There’s nothing here to see. Relax. Beside a Coke machine, a guy who acts As if he’s in a movie Puffs on a Marlboro Light. It’s moody; Nothing’s happening except For blue sky, gas pumps, asphalt. Here’s the precept: … Read More

  The city turns perfume shop. I can’t think at all with the jasmine so thick. Angels circle me like sharks, waiting for sweat or tears, anything wet and bodily. The stasis overwhelms, the sparrows are fucking on my porch. … Read More

  On the brink of our extinction, the milk in the fridge had not yet spoiled. We ate olives with our fingers, swallowed cold beer, thought little of our health. The men in charge were steering blithely into the sun. … Read More

  I just can’t remember the saint whose name I took at my ‘04 Confirmation. Last year one friend took Hildegard. She’s a library scientist. This year another took Dymphna. She’s an artist turned celibate. I turn cringey at the … Read More

  We used to think it was a nebula, and there was a time when people didn’t believe in germs. Of course, almost all the dishes ever made have broken, so what can we expect? Things transmute. Ptolemy misheard the … Read More