poetry

  In the paintings of Tiepolo and Perugino — everyone speared through and through,   everyone suffering, the eyes of saints rolled back behind the lids.   Everyone wearing a crown of thorns or digging their own graves.   Agony … Read More

  How marvelous, the way he looked and looked at all the as-yet-unnamed things. Even as the two nurses   rolled him back and forth under the heat lamps, wiping away blood and meconium, the buttery vernix,   re-clamping the … Read More

  i. May I sew you to a sheet…?   Long Saturdays in the waiting room— a shelf of chipped dishes and trucks, Little Golden Books, stacks of tattered magazines.   Ticking Hidden Objects off a list: a pipe in … Read More

  Drifting into being, yielding heart, lung, eyes, a fact herself in history   though omitting necessarily that sunrise in the brain wherein the vaguest self   follows a trail of scent through the trees.   She never left it … Read More

  Named for the golden stalks under which it sleeps like a ploughgirl dreaming,   or for the runners that stray or “straw” until they root like a new wife at home wherever she lands,   or for the old … Read More

the coal region, PA   In front of the sinking Ukrainian Club, a fat old Veteran plays accordion—reedy, old world, before-the-cold-war, after-the-rapture tune. My cousin and I drive late night to drink Yuengling and show off our out-of-state license plates, … Read More

  Is it always the mothers who refuse to let go, tackle demons and ghosts in the phosphorescent foam, a relentless sea? Or can we blame the moon, its bloated waist of jelly inviting us to pray?   *   … Read More

  Curiosity compelled me to touch your doll’s eye, make it disappear, a dull plop inside her skull. Memory prevented me   from popping off her head to retrieve it. That vision of your deathbed gaze: right ogling upward, left … Read More

  Call the mole-catcher. He’s dead. Oh good. I mean good for the moles. The whole of this side of England is trembling. Veronica has a theory: They’re Dutch moles, they’re good at digging, the last time they came was … Read More

  “All is lovely—all amiable—all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart”—Constable, on Claude Lorrain   So I’m wondering if we were all converted or ordained to be landscape painters of our own psychic interiors, revealing them … Read More

  Because of you, I am dying. Like the rat our landlord is poisoning to make us feel more comfortable where we sleep at night, my days are numbered. I know it more   each night I try to sleep … Read More

  till mirrors can see your body—& insects crawl like lips in between blood & sentence, i shall think of the window nowhere but in you all over —nothing is stopping the straws from giving honey