One season my stomach shrank from staying in bed for months so hungry. When bears hibernate,their bodies recycle to stay alive: reabsorbing urine, feces, like a dream each night.In those winter days,my stronger self receded into that hole we all fear.Dirt from every angle. No one thinks so, but bears do wake in that shadowed …
For JoJo, after “Feel Alright” I watch a couple braid their hands on the A train; not sure if they gripped each other so tightly because of the fearof the pretty human sitting next to them. This city lacks the space for me to yell or sing at my loudest shrill when I am lonely. …
. . . then stopped dead, the sentence waning like a tooth in the milk—. Or instead foreordained into a cavern tangential as a root in its silt-silken bed of underdark. That the shark looks like it survived extinction. Long division. Other deprivations. Cracking my neck, my knuckles, ships in bottles. Ancestry dot com, Old …
i can’t remember how to write a good poemheidegger says writing a poem is making a voyage of discovery i don’t know what a pack rat is but i’d like to be onelook at this hymn to possibility ur paper-tiger confidenceour fluctuations their ongoingnessregrets, we have too manyinsistent as the low rumble of a maseratiwere …
or chrome or canals in the desert, there was a man who looked like youand a woman who looked like me, their faces unknown to themselves.In a house of hair, on the night of their wedding, they undress,cast their robes like beetles shedding, the beginning of skin,the beginning of breaking. He holds her by the …
this is what you’ll never find: VHS cassette reeling until you’re young again; tape-head cleaner in an eye-drop bottlestored above room temperature. remember when, midaction, you push on ejectto use the rewinder until the spoolruns out of breath, the other lung so dark & full the past recreates itself; father’s vinyl player turns a song …
many things have marked you as the alien already here in the New World and so you were not pretending when you pronounced the word: Arkansas, you who have crossed the Atlantic bruised with jet lag and vertigostressing the second syllable, upon descent from the sky, nobody on the floor could un derstand when you …
A man by the name of Skinner becomes famousfor keeping caged pigeons, whom his clock feeds or starves at random. Their tiny twitching heads exaggerate until one bird swings its weight like a pendulum; one turns counterclockwise three times; one aims its beak to the corner and sings, My lovelet me break, which has nothing …
In the university gardensfull of “native and nonnative” trees I come across a leafless bushwith twigs surrounding its branchy base, and there, the plaque painted over, in pencil but somehow formal, its new given name,“Butt Stuff Flower Bush,”and I think of the long historyof butt stuff and bushes, of husbands and sons who experience salacious …
Once, a woman asked her daughter to eclipse herself in the vowels of her name. O, O, O,she said, clasping her daughter’s cold mouth—or was it the throat? Perhaps the entirebody, starved & syllabic, ready to regurgitate the words end & young & I can’t possibly knowwhat I long to say. A certain longing ingrains …