Shots

poetry
  Not his wrist, barcode-wreathed, but the back of his palm he parodied--a tarmac, where a cannula lands like a jet-let. Flight-- whatever that meant–-meant catheter- bound. His guttural coughs…

Improving the Office Art

poetry
  I’ve worked enough winters under this black and white photo of branches and sky on a canvas wide as my stretched out arms. So I lift it from the…

Supermarket Pastoral

poetry
  I saw a ground squirrel with a long naked tail in the wilderness behind the Stop & Shop where the brook rushes into the vortex of an abandoned dryer.…

Mistaken Identity

poetry
  I look up from my grave-- I’m not buried, I’m building on the ground floor. I always intended to find something more than the right button for my coat,…

Four Years of Days

poetry
  For seven years, on four of seven days I walked or biked or rode the subway to her real wood paneling and sat at first then lay so that…

Infant Boy 1895

poetry
  I came into being unknown to myself, a small sac of seawater and soft bones. Time and memory had no meaning for me. Weightless hunger spidered with blood, I…

A Break with Specifics

poetry
  A small space opens inside Tennessee, perennial-ready. At the last moment I manage to stay by the window, looking further. Whose body is that being sent back to ground?…

The Arborist

poetry
  (for Seamus Heaney)   With a two-handed grip, plunging the steel wand deep, there and again over there--the root web, he explains, as broad as the dogwood's crown, feeding…

Δ Δ Δ

poetry
  The Triangle Offense ::: The offense requires wide spacing: Slave ships: Slave ships: 14-hour workday for sewing machine operators: $2 wage a day: Cuts and screens: Garment workers are…

Late Summer Elegy

poetry
  Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees and vanish. Without you whose love was air-thin and particular, I’m left these daughter-hands of bone that do…

Morning

poetry
  I sit naked to the first rays of the sun. I'd wrapped myself in fancy clothes--the glitter of discrimination, the weave of intel- lectual dis- tinction, the heavy silk…

tied

poetry
  They were tied, this couple, not knotted—strands looped and holding each other together—but even. Not the even that’s caged within revenge, but even like bangs cut straight across a…