poetry

  I don’t have to go back to my childhood, there’s nothing there I still want: but of miracles left to me, I’d like to restore a look I once wore and release it in the air. That year I … Read More

              … for we know everything that the Argives and Trojans           did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite.                     Odyssey XII, 189-90 (trans. Lattimore)     Look. There’s Homer under a mastic tree listening to water and … Read More

  You come from behind— press me up against industrial shelves fingers tacky with sugar my arms full thick bricks of butter tumble when you kiss my neck I tug your cotton apron’s edges waist strings bow loose at your … Read More

             for my son Graham   The room shatters with giggles before your hand’s thin worms burrow my ears. When that fails they hook inside my cheeks and nose. Two thumbs pry my eyelids back—tent flaps hazing a pink … Read More

  In 1793, during the French Revolution,          Charlotte Corday was executed by guillotine for the assassination          of Jean-Paul Marat. After her head fell into the basket with a sickening          thump, like an overripe cantaloupe or a coconut, the device’s carpenter … Read More

            after Baudelaire   Settle down now, sadness. It’s time for bed. You asked for evening. Well, here it is. A fine mist covers the city like dread. It may look peaceful, but trust me, it isn’t. People can … Read More

  This is a story of fire, ash, and a child falling into a blaze where she singed her side. This is the child, now thirty, now a woman looking into a mirror at a square of red that marks … Read More

  The nurses named the machine that breathed for my brother. Tigger had a serial number, but no one used it. When doctors stopped in they would ask how Luke and Tigger were. Other unnamed machines tracked his vitals, chimed … Read More

                        of waning gibbous & bloody gumption,                                  how good                       you were, all your loony phases                you bet in one basket & batting                                  two suns’ worth of aces— … Read More

  She was a Swedish translator whose name I don’t remember, but I liked her, half smashed in a little black dress, even as she raised her glass to bash the man I’d soon take back, & marry–too macho! This … Read More

  There is no undertow. No thin string of water that wraps around your toe and pulls you under. There is no underworld. The light oozes and melts away the farther down you go into darkness if deep enough. There … Read More

  What Jubilee saw at Putt-Putt Camp wadint no tire swing. Spanned maybe a whole meander-or-two, crooked. Heard it can shrink around a babys- ankle, or bloom up big enough to buck the Hernando; some call it cooking names like … Read More