Beautiful Boy with Garlands around His Waist
here / i am not his image / & i envy it / i shut my eyes against what is left / the crackling softness of life / like…
Once We Are Severed
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…
As If Death Could Be Washed Off of Us
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…
Temple Street Night Market
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…
Fragments in a Burger Joint
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…
Elvis at NYU
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…
Spring by Botticelli, or Three Women I Can’t Stop Looking At
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…
Things I Am Saving to Write
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…
It’s obvious
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…
get angry that there is no field
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,…