here / i am not his image / & i envy it / i shut my eyes against what is left / the crackling softness of life / like…

  1.   Like one of those bubble-makers spewing drooling chains from balconies during Mardi Gras parades, I am churning out his cells as we speak. Some of the bubbles…

  I try to count the things she can’t   the vine in the mustard yellow bowl left in the water that couldn’t be drained   the tiny grapes I…

  One fortune teller says someone could walk around with a gun, shooting into the air and the bullets would not strike a living soul. Another says she invited a…

  It was raining when the candles finally came out smelling like dish soap. The restaurant was empty so Damien and I scribbled in our notepads. I’ve worked at so…

  An Elvis impersonator was invited to give a one-day graduate seminar at NYU. During the talk, the impersonator demonstrated such techniques as the knee drop, the one-arm windmill, and…

  It’s always the three woman I can’t stop looking at—closed circle, hands entwined, pallid faces   absorbed in thought, a small loop of time. As if even amidst nature’s…

  At first, infants love us for our colostrum.   A few days later and perhaps for months, our milk.   Eventually, though, children love us for nothing.   My…

  for Harry and the snows of Kilimanjaro   How airports are cathedrals, each line a pilgrimage. The tilt of an airplane as seen from the last row, its windows…

  When I’ve been crying. My face, a puffy moon. Heart, mean and wounded. My voice, a flat slick of fat on the soup top.   Last night I dreamt…

  in no field, there can be no horse grazing on no wildrye or wheatgrass,   no yarrow teeming with no ladybugs, no bubbling cumulonimbus in no   baby-blue sky,…