poetry

  At the clinic, a nurse taps my veins and they find their tiny voices. Blood sweeps into the vial and a chunk of snow slides from my boot. The shine on the linoleum floor is brutal, but no one … Read More

  The power plant howls everyone’s hour, portions labor and myth.   A salsa quintet rehearses on the plaza stage.   The figure on someone’s tablet screen says, we now, for the first time in history, have a candidate for … Read More

  This entry is about the U.S. state of Montana. For other uses, see Montana (disambiguation). “Big Sky Country” redirects here. For the song by Chris Whitley, see Big Sky Country (song).   1. Etymology       1.1 Big … Read More

  My kidney snarls at the white wand’s wet nose shoving lovingly into my side, taking   the hipbone-path, sliding west, and I still don’t know why   I’m here with my dress pulled up to my chest, on the … Read More

  Whatever it is that holds the chloroform rag to my mouth at midnight and goes out came back   Saturday morning inside my snooze-bar dream as a white fox,   and entered me by the soles of my feet, … Read More

  There are still the worst minutes of the dream where the dust scatters. Too much light. Too much music. Your body—realized, but unseen—just what an amount of milligrams is called. You’re aware of the rush of freshwater, but not … Read More

  Where can you get a decent graven image these days? Disobedience is no longer what it was.   Don’t you have a few thin ones jingling in your pocket still? Yes but those gods are so gorged on sacrifice … Read More

  After all that, menstruation, parturition, and one unmentionable visit to one of those clinics in Murray Hill in the nineteen nineties,   you doodle on in and do your thing duty free. Nifty little doodad, junebug, dragonfly, dandelion helicopter, … Read More

  The old tom sank his claws and tried to leap from the steel counter, but I held his scruff   and nodded to the vet who murmured, For the best, because Mr. Big sprayed the house with blood   … Read More

    I slice the air   on Freak Street   into neat squares   of night smoke:   karma, master, nice legs,   vision breath.     The risen tokes,   maps in the prayer flags,   find me … Read More

  The strangest sleep I slept was not beneath willows                  on twigs and brush              and what if I weighed the desires I didn’t act on?   … Read More

  They look too busy to retire. Or else some government has cut their pensions and they have no option but to remain industrious, whatever it is that they do, exactly, at certain hours, when the tide has fallen.   … Read More