poetry

  In this city of crows and rose-ringed parakeets, elephants and camels labor down the beach, marionettes tell stories in knotted banyan trees. Old monkeys with young men, men-monkeys in old stories more pure than whatever we believe. For a … Read More

  I am musing for amusements, looking for something good. Ancestral spirits back me up. I am searching, and they are heaven-sent. What is beautiful? It lasts an instant. I hand out lists of lovers and reflections. Someone writes me … Read More

  I drive by first, observing the posted speeds as though I’m looking to live at the end of the street or, season and time of day permitting, I’m hunting an ostentation of Christmas lights. Sometimes, I am simply lost. … Read More

  Looped on the branch, ominous is the goose’s long neck aglow in morning sunlight, black feathers glossy and sleeked down, beak tapered into the air: a jetty. I do not know this goose’s story, the sum of miles in … Read More

  Do you still look and see that it is good? You spoke, then saw what you’d wrought. We are the monster in the mirror, God, your world made of words. Let there be untied sky from earth and sea, … Read More

  In your dream of what never happened a boy turns away from your grief, and each month’s empty womb tolls a compline to spring. Once you knew time as a starving, sumptuous waste that felt better than pomegranates ever … Read More

  A faint glint reflected off the steel beneath the paint, then, like connected stars, like a graved fate, a pattern of scratched lines, scored letters, scarred words— I hate my life punctured through the pigment.

  If the gullet of a brown man is pink, he must be born of salt. Before hanging, his back must be strict as leather pleated by a cherry knife—blue light must swallow his angels to their bones. 911 give … Read More

  Her children burn their prayers so they will go out on the wind. She says: Look at this circle this line look at this hand. See these loves these children this one you have told no one. Here you … Read More

  Both male and female, the clasp unhinged, the opening forced, the two hardened halves splay, release, relax; the wet of the neon blue gone dry and grey, one hundred eyes that once swept the Great South Channel; all the … Read More

  My middle name went down in the Tyrrhenian off Anzio Beach, life jacket filling with the sea. After that, my father, split in half, would sing into the bathroom mirror, where his twin lived. After she died, we found … Read More

  Smooth and cool with a streak the color of clouds and fog broken   by a coastline, the dove’s egg, because I was pregnant,   seemed to be a gift wrapped in sticks that during the storm   fell … Read More