Each summer I plunge my hands deep into sand, scrape knuckles against millennia of rock, dig untilI feel against my palm the wriggling that means success. I don’t shriek or flinch. I’m skilledat the capture, the catch and cradle, then in my palm the prize: pink-gray carapace,eyestalks like tendrils, ten white legs frantic for the …
for Caro We have a bag of bones in the back seat: cradle of sacrum, blood-tinged spine. You gathered them from the scorched grass at Mosquito Creek. Held them to your chestwithout tenderness, the way we held onto resentments the August we became friends— our misplaced devotion to love gone bad.I thought I smelled lingering …
This is a love poem.First, you place your hands on the door. Phantosmia is the smell of something not there Wrong: first, she closes the door before bed, so that should you wake in the night and smell smoke,you may place your hands on the door in order to feel for and determine the intensity …
One morning I woke up and you were gone but I didn’t know it yet. Someone was cuttingyou down while someone else filmed a video of itthat they posted on the internet. I was eating breakfast with my kids. I wasn’t thinking of you.Even then you would have called me stupid, called this poem stupid, …
fills the ditchwith IV bags, slashed weather balloons, cracked screenglass. Hint: thisis about the unacknowledged inconvenience of convenience.The field seems different.Its butterflies have been corralledto study the nanotech secrets of their wings, its geckos boxed and shippedto teach robots to climb walls.A carp nudges sludgeagainst a berm under the bridge, not worldbuilding fast enough,just squeezing …
He rarely spoke of the past and when he did, it wasin flashes—the Norwegian girl from ESL classes those firstAmerican years, how she scared them all riding horses bare-back, eating apples whole: seeds, stem, core. The Japaneseboy serenading the class about sake. The firstCoca-Cola he drank in the new country. How in Koreahe buried their …
“In that particular case, the girl wasn’t mature enough to understand what was going on.” —Bernardo Bertolucci in a 2011 interview, responding to a question about Maria Schneider’s experience being assaulted on the set of Last Tango in Paris while filming a rape scene I lived with a manwho liked for me to come to …
“Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.” —Genesis 9:3 It started in the yard.One day the sourwood called out to me like a loaf of bread,like mountain manna. The baby took from me and left me wanting:Bark broken between teeth, Iwanted dirt heaped on my charity-shop china. I wanted …
says the Delta agent, so I condense, concentratingon making myself colder & smaller like the last tear hung from my chin as I leaned downto kiss you goodbye sister, yesterdayat your service.I will never forget your face, puzzled, on the satin pillow, nor the winceof its complex pleats. I will never forget your voicein the …
“These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play.” —Hamlet, 1.2.83–84 A man might bake biscuits, smoke meat A man might seek pizza in the a.m.As a way to suffocate a hunger With another shameA man might pet his catA man might be watching his wife Fade as slowly as possibleFrom this …