It was a sleepover & she’d never put her hair up in a high ponytail before. We’d been best friends for years, bought cheap necklaces that split heartsinto even best-friend pieces, but tonight we were all sick of her: how she thought the lyrics to TLC’s “Unpretty” were Damn!I’m pretty!, how she cried mascara-blue tears …
As soon as the children are grown I want to trash it, that is, myself: how good and free it feels to be extraneous, a disasteragain. The moment the children drive away past the long whiskers of cholla plants into the freezing darkness I leave bread out, exitthe bathtub while the water runs.Later my daughter …
My eyes know him soon as they spot him face and skin just like my father’s around thirty no pockmarks yet and darker than his already dark from tanning all day in Camagüey The UMAP has him pick yuca and guayaba cut trees fertilize and weed from head to toe of each day He and …
My mother weeps on the toilet, breasts between her knees.Something chewing its way out—She sits there lowing like a cow in a blue field, head bowed—Stroke my back, she says,& I do, palm coaxing the birth of halfway cells.In the night-light she shudders & grunts, then— wet sounds.My mother’s a biologist.She once held my fingers …
Greenwich, Connecticut 2007When I was a boy—a false boy—language was / scattered: birdseed from the backyard feeder / on the reverend’s tongue. Soft, careful stirring of wings, soft settling / of scripture in the low grass—before / the other boys leapt from their pews / to collect meaning in the pastel bowls / of polos. …
“It’s time to get drunk” —Charles Baudelaire We’re inside the barrel of a heat wave, my abstinent partner and I.The earth, the sky, the strange Nevada sun blazingin between. A tattooed river courses up his pale forearm, and a single moustached koi threads upstream, the fish rendered separate from its world.Across the table Hopeless Jack …
How about I’m sorry, and the air hereall damp salt, palming every page of every book to limp and silk. How about the goldenrod’salmost-gone, its flowers faded, grayed, but still clinging, still, up close, holdingthe shape of a kindergartner’s crayoned sun, heavenlyand rayed and simple. Always, here, wind, and the way it simplifies—tea with no …
The lyric fell from the Gulmohar branches soaring above the dry courtyard, floating right into my waiting mouth, upendedand hungry like a wicketkeeper’s sticky glove. The lyric didn’t possess the flesh of fruit or ball; it defied resemblanceto anything that came sealed with the legacy of gravity. Slimy yet firm, a prelude to skin, in …
Suddenly the goldfinches turn oddly obvious,but where am I fromthe morning at this point of day, turning words over into other words beforethey fumble from my mouth to a memory of wishingthe walking away hada different line of thought, but it never does in the way I think it will. The shadow of a cat …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: scaled the summit of ovation in one leap / over that solemn broom, swept demons / away, were swept up and into a scheme / of tender mercies, salve for souls frayed / like …