Fridays became the day I drove in the late morning from Aurora to Ithaca to see Bruce. Our relationship was limited to the hours we spent in the church he and his wife were renovating—and when he was my professor in our creative writing class. We never left the church and were never seen together. …
What’s past is prologue.—Shakespeare, The Tempest 1. 365 Clare Island rises like a rumpled green wizard’s hat at the edge of Clew Bay, a single slouching mountain off the Irish coast framed by the open Atlantic. My backpack and I are gliding toward the island’s quay on the afternoon ferry, under wildly bright August sun. …
Italicized lines are from James Joyce’s Ulysses (Random House, 1986 reissue). ms cuello cause she never give up on me even though theres no hope I liked the way I was portrayed in the note. I saved it in an overflowing binder filled with thank-you notes from students. I had no idea who wrote it. …
on the bluff of the body shut off ears eyes nostrils and throats and feel on the bluff of the body open the churning heart and let syllables run wild run free in the body that carried in the body about to blurt word words and worlds fell in the pupil of sisterly poetry the …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: I gather the words like / blooms. / I gather the words. Like shards / of / a missile. I gather the words like / my / grandmother. My grandmother is / shards / …
Here we are in the centerof summer, the middle of alarm,below a sky gone sepiaas fires char and turn skeletalanything they consume, be it forests, be it homes, be it abandoned carson a stretch of road made gauzy by smoke the wind raises, then ferries off.Ash arrives where I reside, stippling. Ash arrives and I …
Miracle how many, and quickly before stopping each and any day: Perhaps more fortunate to be gifted wings, even just one—This oracle fist I carry is the worst of it, never well-defended. Simply not built to be a moat upon a fortress,And more often than not a beam of light manages to delay me by …
Ha, distance. What a song. There’s no such Thing as space from one empty sea and another. Only clocks to wind between states of being—Now, I am; once I was. For instance:Saturdays at the hospital nowhere didn’t smell Like soap gone bad, my father led the way From room to room. We went to see …
After Jose Hernandez Diaz What gave him away was we could both hear an American flag burning. David sat across, his take-a-number ticket poking out from his patch pocket. The blinds were open—we could see the particles sloping between us. He’d been polite enough to listen to all my record-crate schmaltz before asking where I …
On-ramps braided together the way a turnbuckle twists and the sky was catching fire. Papa was a man of 15-to-20 phrases off the clock—he wouldn’t talk if talking seemed rehearsed. There were 20-to-30 imperatives on the road. “Play the drinking beer song,” “Take care of your jeans, mijo.” Things of that nature. I couldn’t tell …