Maleficent
i. in seventh grade I learned to pray in Spanish is rezar edged like razor, work & worship, I learned adoption was life’s sword: maldición//malediction, bendición//benediction, doubled & edged…
The rectangular dish you brought home from Tokyo
broke clean—one corner snapped away from the blue-black lacquered whole, a long slender triangle like a gymnast in three-quarter split exposing raw bone of ceramic. Your response, a heavy…
Wood and Wool
1. You are wood, you are wool, you are the intricate skeleton of the desiccated leaf, of the dead dehydrated papyrus-bloom 2. you are simple as a scroll…
An Oral History of David Greenspan’s Polly Pockets
A Father Now I’m as liberal as the next man but pink toys? A pale streak all over him. I was drinking draft beer. American as anything. It…
Shelter in Place
The plums rained down on us, then the fireworks. We ordered a package and we took out the trash. We had pulled weeds all season, sprayed aphids, we had…
Elegy for the Polar Bear
The blankness of the animal is profound or, no, a lack of blankness, a total clarity of feature, her color particular and unnamable against the snow whose…
God’s Receptionist
after R.S. Gwynn She takes the hundredth call of the day before banging her toe on the table which happens more than she cares to say. She yelps—longs…
Woman Looking at Two Big Black Hearts
a sculpture by Jim Dine Following the map, I find them— a pair of enormous black hearts, faces, hammers, crumpled cans emerging from the surface, as…
Self-Portrait as Kraken
At one end, my tentacles are thicker than mainmasts, fine enough at the other to pen a too-sentimental plea in your captain’s log. If you release me and I…
elegy for félicette, first cat in space
cats aren’t given names before experiments are concluded bc researchers are less likely to love nameless subjects. this i understand. it remains true, even for those destined to…