Poetry

On the great-room rug on the moonlit island where silverware incubateson your chest when you wake a gift a regiftit arrives with the fanfare of a New Orleans street band a cat’s heralding trumpet in a key of adorationyou visited that city with Michael your best friend and today you will miss his weddingyou biked …

It doesn’t have a name—the night I hit and killed an armadillo crossing Route 13 somewhere betweenCarbondale and Murphysboro. It rolled up inside itself, like a hard year that has lasted longer than anyone wanted,when there came a harsh thud and smack under the car, the wheel shocks crushing the armored shell of the animal.Taught …

Freight cars, barely any stops. Rising stench. Some say,We’ll get shot in the woods. Others say, They’ll waste us away building dams, roads.Nobody knows.It’s all happening now & now—a shard of my mother’s soulthrobbing inside my throat.As she speaks, she hands me a shot glass, the convex meniscus of moonshineshuddering with the train’sclickety-clack.Me, I say, …

Grandma floats over the stovetop— a cloud of light Edges of her soiled robe skim the kitchen floors I sit by her side small like a child I’m all mouth— the rest of the body an afterthought Please forgive me for always thinking about food Jittery jewels of meat jelly laced with fat, jam-topped pancakes …

acrostic using Japanese counters hi fu mi yo i mu na yaHeaps upon bone heaps in this country,furious caesura rimmed with walls, water pours into meeting after emergency legislative meeting—a body yoked to something shiny, according to some bullets—Eat, says my father, eat this underwater moon, reflect on our slowly sinking islands,knotted lines tied to …

—so this thing happened which was no surprise & then this other thing followed // how else to explain the straight-line nature of time so astride it the mind does dizzying things // some of them regrettable // some just sunlight w/buzz in them & a flower //—hey bee // hornet // wasp // whatever …

L’Amarre, Effet de neige pres de Saint-Cloud, Alfred Sisley, 1879I don’t care that the winter was particularly harsh and the artist had to work quickly, the paint freezingin his veins. His mooring lines slope long and black across the iced canvas, like the kelp ropes we sawon that beach near Tillamook, their bulbous roots like …

I keep waking up in rooms I don’t remember entering,and each time I am surprised at how much can happen to the bodywithout its knowing and how much the body holds,our wounds invisible to us until time does its trick and wraps what hurtsin so much nacre we begin to treasure its iridescence.I went on …

He was born too soon and almost too late—my boy trapped in my womb—blood singing and hot for lightbought too dearly, the air beating its fist in his chest against a sealed door.O blue of the blood unsuffused, blue of his blue Vishnu face before his first breath. The cordbroke too soon with him still …