(After Child Ballad 23: Judas) I saw my sister swikele woman beside the road robes ripped and torn from nights in the thicket.…

              (After Child Ballad 12: Lord Randall)   The facts are that the mute girl with the mismatched eyes lived in the greenwood, slicing…

  Hardy’s heart was, upon his death, removed from his body at his request. The rest of him buried in Poet’s Corner, but his heart was buried with his first…

  Twilight now, and the night school teacher sits beneath the great chart of the periodic table in the chemistry classroom the overcrowded college across the street has rented and…

  Wisteria snaps another wooden slat on the arbor. In the kitchen doorway, buttoning a worn cuff,             you say, Stop at Finest, I need…

  Men drive us to suicide,             children pull us back. I'd have more             If it weren't too late.…

  Must be mid-morning, the even light hitting the young woman’s forehead straight on through a window we can’t see. She’s reading a letter, been stuck on the first third…

  The Delaware’s a greenish black river here, flanked by other, slower rivers—fields of snow, rows of leafless sycamores larger than God, two shoulderless snaking roads. I’m in the truck…

              After Simonides, frag. 543   Who locked us, child, inside this cunning chest, left to the stirring sea, the night-lit deep? Should I…

  The nurses pass like wisps of blue cloth brandishing syringes of colorful liquids. They say this is for pain or this is for vermillion or this is for dragon.…

              —after Kiki Dimoula   The goat was bleating so much its voice had grown hoarse. Furious, I opened the oven door: “Knock it…

  Gaze down these pink tunnels into deeper pink. The walls are blossoms fashioned of smaller blossoms attached to raised arms that nuzzle other arms. It’s like watching a parade…