poetry

  Someone running up a flight of stairs in your head heavy bones, human eyes. As the heart grows— life means mostly waiting for life— it assumes a more vertical position within the thoracic cavity. In the street you pass … Read More

  I don’t find you rotten, no, just do your thing and think no more of me, okay?                            . Shop until your money’s spent, or to your heart’s content, but count me out. No way I’ll cotton to this version … Read More

  A part of him understands the fact of this as sport, though then a part of him does not, and stands each time amazed when finally a player goes down hard and everyone is quick to circle around, to … Read More

  Well, more a whisper than a word, it proceeds unsurely, of itself, of the low branches of the bushes it blushes its slow way toward. So he says entropic too, and seems so much more sure of it though … Read More

A thumb of grass in the East & fingers of timbered stream valleys west-bound a cowbird rolls an egg from a dickcissel’s nest parasite    decoy    pond-bed stocked with winter-whitened antlers    the stag’s sharp feet cut through ice-crust    in January   … Read More

The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity.  — Steven Pinker Dream-sentence on the tip of my tongue, guilt an after- taste of soot, and no clue … Read More

  This morning came a tapping, as of someone rapping, from the entertainment room. The writing wasn’t going all that well, so I clicked my save icon, burying the misbegotten thing I’d been toiling to raise from the dead. How … Read More

—for Betty Edwards and Betty Dodson and the ’70s  One who drew with her right brain, another self-pleasuring like mad, both easy to mock in hemp dresses and chunky necklaces. This was the Seventies. Betty who collected us on weekends … Read More

  He limps forward, hamstrung by the maquahuitl breeze. Or does he use such language to get sympathy?   He’s learned the name of every known disease, and claims them all. We know him as Hercules   Bejesus, who flies … Read More

  certain kinds of wind in the blue-green disbelief of your misfortunate and persistent incursion into the unreality of bones blood sinews, the parts of the body belong to the sun braised blue-black with the radiation eagerly sought day after … Read More

  It won’t stay balled, this slick rayon. Thick thread, I’d call it, rather than fine yarn, the grey and green variegated viscose I wind. Greys of battleships and guns, fog, overcast skies, then the greens: aquamarine and celery. Skein, … Read More

  Ladies Union Circle, First Congregational Church, Nantucket; founded 1846; oldest, still active, ladies church group in the US.   Even before I read why they were formed, there’s my mother at the ironing board, an immaculately white altar cloth … Read More