poetry

(La Gitana, Louis Kronberg)         Not the gardenia-painted comb    in the crown of her slick black hair nor the curves of her shawl, its rosebuds swirling, like Spanish dancers, not even the little curl defining her cheekbone, … Read More

  When I telephone my erstwhile inamorata she speaks in the voice of minestrone. Not the minestrone her mother would make having stood the entire morning in a small windowless kitchen throwing diced vegetables into a pot whilst intoning Giacomo … Read More

  The day’s rind grated down to bitter pith you order what the menu calls a seasoned mix of tubes and tentacles. It arrives sheened with something like what condenses on the outside of the glass. Your forehead sheened with … Read More

  I am in the room of my marriage, when I had one. Like a memory of a dead long gone ancestor, Everything is polished with a certain conceit. As if simply by passing, time became right. I can see … Read More

  Three tickets left, she pulls herself into the monster truck, rearing on hind wheels, buckles herself into the driver’s seat, stiff-arms the wheel. No one snaps her picture, one more flash in pulsing neon. Daddy has dissolved into the … Read More

  He sensed his ear, but he could not see it. In the blind this is called blindsight. The last failed effort of the body to survive— Keep this object carefully. The ear rested on the table alone among blue … Read More

  Detached from everything but the fluorescent flatlands where bitchy angels rule the morphine drip and gauge the numbers in broken verticals like a child’s rain— I was stroking her forehead when up up she came swimming hard eyelids fluttering … Read More

  South Natick, Massachusetts   Before they could scrape, prime, caulk, patch the divots and deep cracks and repair the ubiquitous rot, three men in t-shirts and torn jeans covered with sheets of plastic the 1829 Holbrook bell and Adam’s … Read More

  After Li Bai, For Shujen Wang   5. A Song   When she glides around the garden her light dress lifts like a cloud and her face, because the mind makes it so, appears to be a rose. And … Read More

  You find yourself making a list of goods late at night, when the kids have fallen asleep and your wife is making tomorrow’s lunches. When no one is home, you scan for what you will need, you steal items … Read More

  I’m told he sees his own reflection in the glass as a competitor, a bird he must face down— I’m not so sure. This morning, there’s the sound again—despite a sleep-soaked overcast, the house still dark inside. Thwap!—a blast … Read More

  let’s go to my house you say, let’s go to Mom’s house, the floorboards will creak in places you don’t remember—guaranteed. And you will smell fruit where there was absence, see couples in photographs instead of baby pictures. You … Read More