poetry

  Many things are love, and failure         is one. And metal, and salt, and                         uranium fields pulsing in the noondark.         … Read More

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  for Alan Soldofky   A slick slug comes to glisten in the ear. It slides where once a wary owl would perch To scan what seemed an overlay of earth– Figural owl in a figural ear. Flown or fallen, … Read More

  for Billy, Nikki, Josey, Rosie, and Pearl   We drink good whiskey under the magnolia trees, talk about how the dead can’t see how great life gets. What a rip! All the happinesses we couldn’t have imagined, growing up. … Read More

  Because you swarm when the sky turns heavy, we call you thunderdoll and kill you to protect our thatch   then we snap your heads and slip them in our pockets, or give them to our wives   to … Read More

  like a flower that only opens at night. Call it moon vine: only flower half the time.   Blossom unfastened by absent light —how withholding spins   desire. What I want he does not want, besides this perfect knot … Read More

  It was time to build the trap, so I sat on the bed, watched, didn’t help, as he fashioned it. Tested the tension of each line, formed a ring on the end.        to be fixed               eclipsed … Read More

  Enslaved people’s quarters, Woodlawn Plantation, Virginia, 1820   We lay side by side in the heat, in the night’s palm, the dried sweat of day thick upon our chests, like sap that hardens inside the grooves   of sugar … Read More

  When the young die, for weeks they appear in halls and crowds–the slap whisper of semblance in a body or head, a gait, any remembrance that likens death to life.  It is always clear that they are not, yet … Read More

  Grief is the floor. There is a door there, a door in the floor. On the other side, on the underside, in the dark, along with pipes and wires, is what rests on what, what now and again shifts, … Read More

  1. So many years of nightly death have made us practiced, professional.   2. Death on the other hand is scripted, sheep-worn, muzzy, and tastes bland as a tomb.   3. Death,   whom one might call an enemy … Read More

  And maybe I’ll go back someday and stand in the shadow of the crab apple tree, look up at the window of the old apartment, stand under the leaves until my old neighbor Rose emerges with her cane, her … Read More