Blackberries
We could not have been much, two junkyard kids picking blackberries down by the log pond until our thumbs and tongues stung black with love and the footfalls of hunters down by the water made my...
View ArticleBlasphemy is Easy in Love
Her brothers passed me at the dinner table like salt. Her sisters took me out of each other’s arms with fingers spread to protect my neck. Aunt Margie and Grammie Lorraine prayed three rosaries for me,...
View Articlefrom Dear Anna
Anna, I like that picture you sent me of a wooden chair spotted with pink petals in a misty and abandoned parking lot. I wonder if this is how the healing begins. Sitting in a fog alone. They say that...
View ArticleQuiet
A few months ago, near the end of the summer, we stood chatting over the fence, far in the back by the old shed with the paint peeling from the door, a hoe in your hand, trowel in mine. You talked...
View ArticleBlackbird
Over the furrows of the northern field— a coded flash of blackbird wings. Memory bursts from the hedgerows: a pair of girls in skirts and knee socks and weed-flowered hair, a fawn decomposing in the...
View ArticleCoveting Apertures
To be a man. to be two men, together. To feel absences filled— hard pressure, thrusting pain— to take pleasure without fear of fullness, without fear of my womb, without the threat of a body...
View ArticleAntitheticality
When I died I had a self reminder on the back of my hand. I forget what it said now, but it was something like, Don’t forget that thing you are supposed to remember. My sister, fresh from meditation,...
View ArticleGertrude Stein’s Poodle
She. They. They call. They call and call. They call me Basket. Come, Basket. Good Basket Darling, cher, sweet Basket. Ce qui est la Panier? We play. But I am. I am more. I am tricky. I am more than a...
View ArticleOnce More for Love on the T
There are old subway tickets taped to my refrigerator. One still holds three trips’ fare left over from a visit with you. I think of all the time holed up there, all that steeled thundering I will...
View ArticleTiny Little Suitcases
You were so nice it jawed my jugular and has yet to let go. Eating ice cream with you makes me suspicious. Your beard has taken up residency in the upper left ventricle of my heart. A nest of finches...
View ArticleA Fresh Start Will Put You on Your Way
Where would an astronaut park her space ship? Considering she has pushed her bowling ball in anticipation of its collision, and life forms gather to hear Jailhouse Rock, the void is not completely...
View ArticleHaving Sex with AIDS
Bruno says I’m pretty— the noble sentiment he must make. My bravery resides in hospital curtain resurrections. I’m still here and I must listen to Bruno now. He talks with a swollen bird’s chest—warm...
View ArticleIn The Dustlight, Listen
1/ Tonight the trees are paper nuns leaning over fox bones. And you’re still here. Near the railroad cars. Near the shallow hillside. Your hands just as thin as they always were. 2/ Give me your...
View ArticleTroy In The Cancer Ward
Such a Greek gift this cancer is inside your body, crone artifact. Cronus, chemo, metastasis, a blade taking time in your breast, adulterers flogged, our family sacked. Poseurs and posies, pollen...
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Tiny Little Suitcases
You were so nice it jawed my jugular and has yet to let go. Eating ice cream with you makes me suspicious. Your beard has taken up residency in the upper left ventricle of my heart. A nest of finches...
View ArticleA Fresh Start Will Put You on Your Way
Where would an astronaut park her space ship? Considering she has pushed her bowling ball in anticipation of its collision, and life forms gather to hear Jailhouse Rock, the void is not completely...
View ArticleNegative Space
(Florence, Italy) As I approach the piazza’s open-air gallery, Bologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman thrusts above quarried stone — Romulus’s warrior stands dominant over the crouched Sabine man, while...
View ArticleAwkward Love Poem
It’s not like you can compress the files of love to fit them in, there are eight thousand sixty twelve of them in orange steel drawers, not labeled well: you can’t, say, squeeze in rows of tiny corn...
View ArticleFamous Last Words
It’s now, she says. Now, & never again – so we beat on, boats against the current & swooned slowly, heard the snow falling faintly through the universe. I had been there before, lying on my...
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