Poetry

To be a child again. Is my wish. Something earthy and pleasant. Something before knowledge. Before. Me and the kids down the street making wooden gravestones with our names on them for Halloween, before we knew that one kid would die. How the gravestones lived with us years after, in the garage. Childhood, like a …

This content is only accessible to logged in members. Please login to continue.

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- …

(To see the poem in its ideal orientation, use the double arrows on the top right-hand side to rotate clockwise. Arrows on the top left can also help you navigate to all pages of the poem.)

was always our tax status. There’s no lovein money. Sometimes there’s no love in love.Sometimes love is a fish-gillslit in your heart through which you learnto breathe. That’s how it was.When I found the long silver hooksof another woman’s earringsin his bathroom drawer, I raisedan eyebrow. I said, “Oh.” Sometimesa waterspout rises from the lake …

grandma unfolds her dress, & 1967 patternsinto life, its story mapped in provinces, infamilies splayed naked on a dusking weave. The dressis handsewn, seaming bound by restitching. Lilac & rhubarbthreads haphazard & layer threefold along the waistlike fingers of smoke. Mesmerizing, because a dying fireis a spectacle. The dress of a hometown documentingevery small violence. …

title from Hippocrates, translated by David Hayden Camden my body wants a babydespite the circumstances, the ramen at the kitchen sink at midnight,the bargain-bin fruit, jelly-soft and splitting, the amex too sharpat the register, drawing blood.the whole world is having a baby. my cousin is having a baby,any day now, gray and grainy on the …