Poetry

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 …

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 …

banish the word offering—i prefer paymentur likes are insincereat dream state universityguests may enjoy warm seltzerhollow skiesmy soiled vuitton pantiesit’s a family affairi love appearing as epigraphs in ur messy poemsthis may surprise u but i was horrible at woodshopsometimes i feel like a gorilla in an elevatordream: greg is not getting any younger. i …

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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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 …