Praying in Bedlam
Christopher Smart knelt on these floors. He praised winter, he wrote Geoffrey on the walls. He shouted I’m barefoot. I lost my rosary. Praying in Bedlam used…
Brotherhood and the Strait Jacket
In Mr. Rodriguez’ high school World History class, a lecture about the crushing stress on ordinary citizens—through poor harvests, through taxes on the very salt and wheat needed for…
University Square
We weren’t anywhere we weren’t nearby When she gave a shriek My friend had taken a bullet And was now walking the bullet around in his back He’d…
Every Poet Needs a Brother
He will be a beggar–– no, a barber! And he will polish your nails each time you lay down your pen even though hair is his only…
The Nineties
I love these new super bookstores! Right here on upper Broadway— a standing invitation to a private stately home stocked with milling lounging browsing guests sipping demitasse or eating,…
To My Old Lewis Turco The Book of Forms
I fell for your strange lace of unstressed x’s, the beautiful a bb a cc patterns, mysterious codes I didn’t grasp but simply liked the look of. The primitive…
Halloween Vespers with Homemade Vader
Bless the amber porch light that coronets his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets this dusk breeze bounces on elastic straps thin as earthworms baked black atop the stoop.…
Long White Hallway
I wait for you there, pushing the baby in his stroller. The baby claps with concentration and delight. A tiny, black-haired woman’s cheek bleeds as I walk from Emergency…
How Your Leaving Left Me
Feeling like the neighborhood cat who fell through the screen of my open skylight, curiosity in this case leading, not to death, but limbo—stuck in an empty house until…
Wife’s Song
starts skygreen as a glow in the chest cracks like a tree branch, her lips a deluge of lost notes, plastic fossils a lone mop tumbling down the street…