Poetry

It will be better, our friend said,           to just accept that everythingis gone—as though lightening            with that expression the weight of each breathless            click throughout the evening,as on a map we watched            her apartment standing right beyond the fire’s red            line but never crossingin. As if after evacuating            the home, one next empties hope. I …

Outside, the swarm. The dog found it first,ran crying, and now we’re both wearing balaclavasin July. You in mittens, two sweatshirts, some Oakleysfrom God knows where, hands up against the sliding glass.After the poison, the exterminator, still the waspsevery morning. The dog’s face swollen now like a football.In their nest they sleep well, we think. …

after Untitled (Hang iambics), Cy Twombly, 1994 so why not ask that halo of dark whisper for anything, everything: why not write the litany of wax and ash on the first page of the book ofAll My Shortcomings? Haven’t I lived long enoughin the bone hollow, long enough in bonebreak and brakelight?When do I not …

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in memory of Alex Pacas (19) and Wyatt Whitebread (14), who died in a grain silo owned by Consolidated Grain and Barge in Mount Carroll, Illinois, on July 28, 2010 “The view was all in lines / Straight up and down of tall slim trees / Too much alike to mark or name a place …

Blank peal of a glass door in the archive of memory,you want nothing or you fear nothing, breath is the daughteryou never had. Escape offers its temporary attention, gazeset permanently on some middle distance at which a bridgecan be made out, dimly, to burn. I stepped ontothe archaeological site with a confidence borne of schematicsmy …

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback, published by Random House, 1982.

           with a phrase from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” a name is a noose that won’t let you be.my full name was once woven from threefibers, a cord of three that i dare to breakinto two knots on a tongue. please excuse,foreman, my Hebrew. Yirmeyahu means Godis high. it’s why i love the tower from distance.O- …

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