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 …
December 2024 There is usually a wave-gnashed sea & someone lost in it, or a tree hewn down for a cross& a stone rolled away from a tomb, the hymn holding both storm & balm,but here the lake is a calm leaden gleam, long seams of ice soldering its edgeto a frozen shore. The sky …
cut along the dottedline between fingers handsearlobes we who alone have lasheson both lids make a ventral incision remove the pretensefrom tense findthe collective firing patternin heap or mass we exact ourselves grain by rain-glitter grain from anthill ziggurat to fecundity of compass pointsextracted out of the animal parry apartappendages the patents pending such unravelersof …
Even in the dark, their flowers tilt toward the last place they felt the light.They bend on narrow stems, their blossoms fringed like the hems of party dresses.We have waited too long to plant them. So they bloom in pots on our patio, the frost-time over now, and they leantoward summer, long months of scorch …
Pretty in small patches, its clustersnot quite blue but a shade of purple sky, the plant can spread too quicklyif allowed, undemocratic in its impulse to possess the garden. Lately, I worry about anything inclined to power—the wood violets like petechiaein the blanched gaze of the lawn, the spurge that chokes by tangling,the bitter cress …
Before my mother’s mother (beside her mother), my father’s mother in her casket. There are no men beyond my mother’s father or my father.Perhaps this is why they loved their camera,my young parents who photographed everything beyond my mother’s mother.Beside my mother: her dog, red motor vehicles, a wooden spoon, an iron bell behind my …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: Through one she says, “I want you to be happy.” / Through the other she tells an anecdote from her own life I need to be generous to flowers to be generous to animals. …
I’m the stick in the spokes, the concocted knuckle-rap, the punch line to the knock-knock joke you’ve heard many times before that’s only a blurted Moo. I’m the button-holer, the nope, a flung wrench, the reason nothing coheres. Remember long ago,watching on TV all those millions of balloons rise up over Cleveland in a rhapsodicpolka-dotted …
It’s not exactly going well, the berries so overripe they collapse into a jammy mess whenever I even touch them, and weeks ago the canes in this5 × 8 patch grew into a cramped scattershottangle I can barely push my way through. Once again I tried. Once again last spring I envisioned tied-back tidy rows, …
There was a sandpit. Conveyor belt, sludge pond, river of glass. There were halls for pouring and for polishing,mixing room, a building to house the boilers. Director’s villa. Administration. Depot,canteen, workshop, and a room for fellowship. Kiln room, kindergarten, apartments for workers, the owner’s family homeon the city’s market square. Plate glass, wired glass, opaqueand …